Jason Sondhi
With the holidays over and new business afoot, January ended up an exciting month for a host of SotW-featured filmmakers. We thought it would be fun to do a link roundup that gathered some of their accomplishments.
First off, to Park City…
- Nate Parker, featured by us for #AmeriCAN, was the breakout star of Sundance as his Birth of a Nation secured the largest acquisition in festival history, $17.5 million from Fox Searchlight! It also went on to pick up the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize, and the U.S. Dramatic Audience Prize.
- SotW-Award winning duo DANIELS have been highlighted multiple times, and their feature debut Swiss Army Man, was one of our most anticipated films of the fest. The team endured some negative publicity surrounding the debut, but the film ultimately emerged as one of the most buzzed about at the fest, getting a 7-figure acquisition from cool-kid distributor A24, and with the DANIELS grabbing a directing award from the fest.
- On the awards front, shoutouts as well to Penny Lane, and Andrew Ahn for picking up an Editing and Performance award respectively for their features, NUTS! and Spa Night.
- We had plenty of alums in the shorts section too, with a few notable winners, none more so than Jim Cummings, a producer for Ornana, whose directing effort took home the prestigious Short Film Grand Jury Prize! Sol Friedman grabbed the Jury Prize for Non-Fiction.
Away from the fest, some cool news from the worlds of Film & TV…
- Eddie O’Keefe, whose SotW-Award winner The Ghosts, we declared to be “on its way to classic status“, has had his Blacklist script, When the Streetlights Go On, picked up for series development by Hulu.
- Ryan Koo, the impresario behind No Film School, and a gifted director, released Amateur in 2013 as a proof-of-concept to win additional support for his feature script. That gambit has finally paid off, as Koo’s film is part of a new 5 film slate, greenlit by Netflix.
- We first wrote about Kirsten Lepore back in 2009, and she is one of the very few filmmakers we’ve featured 3 times. So, it was a supreme pleasure this month to witness the immense amount of media love sent her way for her guest-directed episode of Adventure Time, the first time the beloved show has been animated in stop-motion.
- Another favorite animator, Robert Grieves, also caught on with a beloved kid’s show, animating this awesome segment for the latest episode of Sesame Street. Robert says that producers at the show watched his previous short on Short of the Week, and reached out to him directly about the commission. Amazing!
Lastly, an interesting new product…
- Caleb Slain is an incredibly talented young filmmaker, but his update isn’t about a film. The Verge has a cool story on Flowstate, a new writing app that deletes what you’ve written if you stop for longer than 7 seconds. The idea came from workshop exercises Slain participated in at the Sundance Labs, and it’s designed to enter a writer more quickly into a psychological state beneficial to writing. Sounds scary, but worth a shot!
Have you been featured on Short of the Week? We want to hear what cool stuff you’re up to. Drop us a line at info@shortoftheweek.com