The athletes in question are a mixed bunch, all with the commonality of thinking outside the box with their respective sports. Danny MacAskill, Scottish Urban Trials rider extraordinaire; Kilian Martin, Spanish skateboarder (and his LA filmmaker Brett Novak); Parkour legends Paul ‘Blue’ Joseph, Phil ‘Professor Longhair’ Doyle and Mathieu Ledoux (working with director Claudiu Voicu); and Keelan Phillips, the amazing British BMX Flatlander all showcase their skills and, too, their personalities and unique approach that inspires them to perform.

Concrete Circus is now available through iTunes in Canada and the UK. Check it out if you are in either of those locales, or watch the trailer and wait for the USA release!

Concrete Circus tease from Mike Christie on Vimeo.

The details are simple: create a video cinematic experience of almost any genre (refer to the contest rules for any exclusions) and make it 15 minutes or less, submitting it after to the channel to be enjoyed by millions upon millions of viewers. Each film will be judged by the masses and the 10 finalists will be granted a spot at the Venice Film Festival where they will compete for the coveted grand prize: a chance to undergo a new work that will be produced by Ridley Scott and his team (as well as a $500,000 grant).

With the innovations that technology has allowed in video cinema, independent film is taking on the conversation of storytelling in new and compelling ways; a breath of fresh air in a seemingly murky pool of samey singularity.

Visit the Your Film Festival You Tube channel to watch the announcement by Ridley Scott and enter for your chance to make your stories come to life!

Newlyweds, a film of surprising quality given the surprisingly low budget of $9000, gives us part of Burns’ perspective on the shifting indie world and opens the door to new and innovative ways for young and eager filmmakers to get at it (yes, get at it – as in, get at some filmmaking!).

Recently Burns did a video interview with Collider.Com where he talked about his recent role in the movie Man On A Ledge, a film telling the story of an ex-cop feigning suicide as a front to a greater plan in achieving vindication for a crime he did not commit. In the interview Burns covers the bridges that independent film has crossed between its outbreak in the 90s to now when, he feels, technology is opening the door to a much wider set of creative minds.

Check out the interview here, or at Collider.Com.

No contribution is too small, and the festival offers great perks to any and all sponsorship packages (even just $10 gets you a ticket to the exclusive event).

box[ur]shorts™ Film Festival was conceived in 2005 after Giacun Caduff presented the idea of screening movies in jukeboxes to collaborator Ryan Reichenfeld. The two met a few months earlier at a reality TV show and decided to start a short film festival where filmmakers get a lot more exposure than at other short film presentations. “box your shorts!” – box[ur]shorts™ will put short films literally in a box. At Giacun’s apartment in Los Angeles, they constructed the prototype box that would later find its first home at Catch 22 Café in West LA.

To read the full history of this festival visit their festival history webpage here. Otherwise, head over to their IndieGoGo page to make a contribution toward making this festival great!

Beast Of The East Productions, a company based in one of those underutilized sections of New York, recently filmed in a great locale that is quite close to home for them and certainly an example of what ELSE New York has to offer.

Here is a video interview with the company on set of their upcoming film Love and Small Print in Dix Hills, NY. With actors, executives and crew all homegrown its sure to be something that we can all relate to – barred from the hassles of Manhattan.

The organic necessity of documentaries like “Second Class Citizens,” if it should be named that, give it that fortuitous nature of needing nothing more than the time of day to sit through its trailer. The challenge after this is less than trying to decide how much to donate, because it is impossible to not agree that this documentary in full length will be a winner in every sense of the term.

Here is the trailer for “Second Class Citizens,” proposed documentary by Ryan James Yezak of Los Angeles, CA whom himself is a powerful advocate for the cause of this film apart from desiring to be its director:

In Turkey, though, and for men specifically, the burden of being homosexual is one that comes with a stiff price if your quest is to live your life outside of the military. In the film Zenne Dancer (2012), most recently featured on CNN and releasing today in Turkey, this struggle is examined in the name of a friend – a gay male and friend to the directors Caner Alper and Mehmet Binay who was murdered by his own father for his homosexuality.

The directing duo explain in their interview with CNN that their friend may have known his life was in danger but continued to live his life though pressured into returning home to be “cured” of his so-called “illness.” The darkness that dwells in the deepest pits of the hearts of persons capable of a vicious injustice such as that calls out to the need for films like this to reach as many audiences as possible and, once again in what seems to be a devastatingly redundant cycle, prove that the differences of homosexuals doesn’t warrant the actions against them. Prejudice, of any type, is nothing more than a virus that feeds off of the will of weak individuals and Zenne Dancer sets out to bring these weak individuals into public view so that they may be corrected.

Check out the trailer for this film, and stay tuned for updates on screenings in the United States and internationally.

The film, directed by John Stimpson and debuting on Lifetime Network this weekend, has the community budding with the new found discovery of talent right in the backyard of this great locale. Liz Vassey (from CSI) stars as mother to a daughter who commits suicide, and thus unfolds a conspiracy that goes deeper than anyone could imagine. Here is a short synopsis from Lifetime:

Suburban mom Rachel feels pretty lucky; while other moms talk about their fights with their moody daughters, Rachel and Dina have a close relationship. Dina tells her everything… or so Rachel thinks. When Dina suddenly commits suicide, Rachel is devastated and confused. Her search for answers as to what happened in her daughter’s final days leads her to some painful discoveries about the secrets that Dina was trying to keep and the bullying that was tearing her apart. Rachel’s quest helps her understand the pain her daughter was forced to endure when a naked picture intended for her boyfriend goes viral. But when Rachel starts receiving anonymous threats during her investigation, she realizes that there may be more going on than meets the eye.

Everyone involved is thrilled that the film was wholly sourced out of Worcester. “I’m very excited,” said Sarah Cote who plays a character named Sarah in the film. Cote is a recent graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and feels that this film may validate the use of Worcester as a film hub full of talent.

The film has been receiving a great deal of attention given the ongoing and very current trend of advocacy for stricter policing of bullying in schools. Though the problem has existed for years, activism seems to be in full swing given the transparency that bullying has achieved through cyber relations between students, faculty, and staff.

Here is a sneak peak at the film via a trailer on vimeo:

Sexting in Suburbia Trailer 2012 from dragonflipper on Vimeo.

Again, the film airs this weekend on Lifetime Network (though, unfortunately, coincides with the New England Patriots v. Denver Broncos NFL Playoff Game) so don’t miss this thriller which is sure to showcase talent that deserves recognition!

U.S. DOCUMENTARY JURY

Fenton Bailey
Fenton Bailey made his Sundance Film Festival debut in 1998 with the documentary Party Monster. He
later co-wrote and co-directed a narrative version of Party Monster, which debuted at Sundance in 2003.
Fenton has gone on to produce and/or direct seven films launched at the festival, including Inside Deep
Throat and, most recently, the Emmy®-nominated documentary Becoming Chaz. In 2010 he produced the Emmy®-winning documentary The Last Beekeeper, and in 2011 he produced and directed the Emmy®-nominated Wishful Drinking.

Shari Berman
Shari Springer Berman is an Oscar and Emmy®-nominated filmmaker. With partner Robert Pulcini, she
wrote and directed American Splendor (Grand Jury Prize, 2003 Sundance Film Festival; FIPRESCI
Award, Cannes Film Festival; Best Adapted Screenplay, Writers Guild Awards and Best Adapted
Screenplay Nomination, Academy Awards®). Cinema Verite, Berman and Pulcini’s most recent film, received nine Emmy® nominations including Best Movie, Outstanding Directing and a win for Best Editing.
Their first film, Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen’s, won Best Documentary Feature at the 1997 Hamptons International Film Festival.

Heather Croall
Heather Croall is the Director for Sheffield Doc/Fest, the premiere documentary event in the UK and
regarded as one of the best documentary events in the world. Heather was previously the director of
the Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC), where she developed the innovative
matchmaking pitching initiative MeetMarket.

Charles Ferguson
Charles Ferguson directed and produced Inside Job, which won the Academy Award® for Best
Documentary Feature in 2011. His first documentary, No End In Sight: The American Occupation of Iraq, premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and won a Special Jury Prize. The film went on to be nominated for the Oscar in 2008. Charles is the author of four books, including High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner’s Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars and Computer Wars: The Post-IBM World (co-authored with Charles Morris). He is currently working on a book about the global financial crisis, to be released by Random House in Spring 2012. Charles is the founder and president
of Representational Pictures, Inc.

Kim Roberts
Kim Roberts is an editor of feature documentaries. Her recent work includes Waiting for Superman, Food, Inc., Autism the Musical, and the upcoming Last Call at the Oasis. Kim won an Emmy® for Autism the Musical, her third nomination. She has received two Eddie Award nominations from the American Cinema Editors, and a WGA nomination. Her other films include: Oscar Nominees and Sundance Grand Jury Prize Winners Daughter from Danang and Long Night’s Journey into Day, Two Days in October, The Fall of Fujimori, Lost Boys of Sudan, Daddy & Papa, A Hard Straight and Splinters.

U.S. DRAMATIC JURY

Justin Lin
Justin Lin’s solo directorial debut, the critically acclaimed Better Luck Tomorrow, premiered at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and garnered a nomination for the Grand Jury Prize. In April 2003, the film went on to make box office history as the highest-grossing (per-screen average) opening weekend film for MTV Films/Paramount Pictures. In 2009, he directed Universal’s Fast & Furious, which reunited the original cast of the franchise and sparked new life for series. Justin then directed the critically-acclaimed fifth installment of the franchise, Fast Five, which has become one of Universal’s most financially successful movies of all time.

Anthony Mackie
Anthony Mackie is a classically trained actor who studied at the Julliard School of Drama. His work spans
the stage and screen. He was discovered after receiving rave reviews while playing Tupac Shakur in the
off-Broadway Up Against the Wind. He earned IFP Spirit and Gotham Award nominations for his
performance in Rodney Evan’s Brother to Brother, which won the Special Dramatic Jury Price at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, as well as best feature at the Independent Spirit Awards. He also played Sgt. JT Sanborn in Kathryn’s Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, a film that not only earned him an Independent Spirit Award nomination, but also earned Academy Awards® for the Best Motion Picture of the Year, Best Achievement in Directing and Best Writing.

Cliff Martinez
Cliff Martinez began as a drummer for several bands during the punk era including the Red Hot Chili
Peppers and the Dickies. He later scored Steven Soderbergh’s first theatrical release, 1989’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, leading to a longstanding relationship which includes Kafka, The Limey, Traffic, Solaris and Contagion. His credits also include Narc, The Lincoln Lawyer and Nicolas Refn’s Drive.

Lynn Shelton
Lynn Shelton was a stage actor until attending graduate school in photography at the School of Visual
Arts, at which point she became an editor and experimental filmmaker. Her first narrative feature as a
writer/director, We Go Way Back, won the Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance in 2006. Her second, My
Effortless Beauty, premiered at SXSW and earned her the Acura Someone to Watch Award at the Independent Spirit Awards. Humpday, her third feature, was awarded a Special Jury Prize at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival as well as the John Cassavetes Award at the Independent Spirit Awards. Your Sister’s Sister premiered at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival and is playing in the out-of-competition Spotlight section at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

Amy Vincent
Amy Vincent is an award-winning cinematographer. She has worked with Kasi Lemmons on Eve’s Bayou,
Dr. Hugo, Caveman’s Valentine and with Craig Brewer on Hustle & Flow, Black Snake Moan, and the recently released Footloose. In addition, Amy’s work has garnered prestigious awards, including the 2005 Sundance Film Festival Cinematography Award for Hustle & Flow and the 2001 Women in Film Kodak Vision Award.

WORLD DOCUMENTARY JURY

Nick Fraser
Nick Fraser has served as the Editor of Storyville since it started in 1997. After graduating from Oxford he worked as a reporter, television producer and editor. His publications include a biography of Eva Peron, The Voice of Modern Hatred, and The Importance of Being Eton. Storyville films have won more than 200 awards, including four Oscars, a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and several Griersons, Emmys® and Peabodys.

Clara Kim
Clara Kim is Senior Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center. She was formerly Gallery Director &
Curator at REDCAT in Los Angeles where she organized residencies, commissions, exhibitions and
publications with international contemporary artists. She was co-curator of the international biennial
Media City Seoul 2010 and organized a global forum on independent spaces called State of Independence in 2011. She has sat on juries for Creative Capital Foundation, Artadia Artist Fellowship, Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and Louis Comfort Tiffany Award; is on the advisory board of East of Borneo; and is the recipient of fellowships from the Warhol Foundation and the Asian Cultural Council.

Jean-Marie Teno
Jean-Marie Teno has been producing and directing films on the colonial and post-colonial history of Africa
for over 25 years. His films are noted for their personal and original approach to issues of race, cultural
identity, African history and contemporary politics. Teno’s films have been honored at festivals worldwide:
Sundance, Berlin, Toronto, Yamagata, Paris, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Liepzig, San Francisco, and London. Teno has been a guest of the Flaherty Seminar, an artist in residence at the Pacific Film Archive of the University of California, Berkeley, a Copeland Fellow at Amherst College, and has lectured at numerous universities. He was a Visiting professor at Hampshire College in 2009.

WORLD DRAMATIC JURY

Julia Ormond
British actress Julia Ormond received the London Drama Critics’ Award for Best Newcomer in Christopher
Hampton’s Faith, Hope and Charity. She starred in the epic Legends of the Fall, played the lead role with Harrison Ford in the film Sabrina, and starred in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. In 2010 she won a supporting actress Emmy® Award for her role in the HBO Movie Temple Grandin. She is the Founder and President of the Alliance to Stop Slavery and End Trafficking (ASSET), which works with corporations, NGOs, government officials, and individuals to create the systemic change needed to eradicate slavery at source. Julia is a former United Nations Goodwill Ambassador against Trafficking and Slavery, and the founding co-chair of Film Aid International. She can currently be seen in the Weinstein Company’s My Week with Marilyn in which she plays actress Vivien Leigh.

Richard Pena
Richard Peña has been the Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Director of the
New York Film Festival since 1988. At the Film Society, Peña has organized retrospectives of Michelangelo Antonioni, Sacha Guitry, Abbas Kiarostami, Robert Aldrich, Roberto Gavaldon, Ritwik Ghatak, Kira Muratova, Youssef Chahine, Yasujiro Ozu, Carlos Saura and Amitabh Bachchan, as well as major film series devoted to African, Swedish, Israeli, Cuban, Polish, Hungarian, Arab, Korean, Taiwanese and Argentine cinema. He is a Professor of Film Studies at Columbia University, where he specializes in film theory and international cinema, and from 2006-2009 was a Visiting Professor in Spanish at Princeton University. He is also currently the co-host of WNET/Channel 13’s weekly Reel 13.

Alexei Popogrebsky
Alexei Popogrebsky was born in 1972 in Moscow into a family of a screenwriter. He wrote and directed the award-winning films Roads to Koktebel (2003) (with Boris Khlebnikov), Simple Things (2007), and How I Ended This Summer (2010), set and shot on a polar station in the Russian Arctic and based entirely around two characters. The film won two Silver Bears in Berlin, Gold Hugo in Chicago and Best Film at BFI London Film Festival. Alexei is currently developing his first English-language project, a 3D fantasy drama.

ALFRED P. SLOAN JURY

Scott Burns
Scott Burns recently wrote the screenplay for the Warner Bros. film, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. The film, starring Bradley Cooper and currently in development, is set to begin production in early 2012 and marks Burns’ fourth collaboration with Steven Soderbergh, who will direct. He also wrote Contagion and cowrote the Academy Award®-winning Bourne Ultimatum, starring Matt Damon and directed by Paul Greengrass. As a producer, he received the Humanitas Prize and the Stanley Kramer Award from the Producers Guild of America for his Academy Award®-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. He wrote and directed HBO Films’ critically acclaimed PU-239, which was produced by Soderbergh and George Clooney. Scott also wrote The Library, a stage play based on the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School with Kennedy/Marshall producing. He began his career in advertising and was part of the creative team responsible for the original “Got Milk?” campaign.

Tracy Day
Tracy Day co-founded the World Science Festival in 2008 with world-renowned physicist and best-selling
author Brian Greene. She serves as CEO and oversees the creative and programmatic offerings of the
World Science Festival. She is a four-time National News Emmy® award-winning journalist and has produced live and documentary programming for the nation’s preeminent television news divisions for over two decades. At ABC News she was producer for This Week with David Brinkley, editorial and field producer for Nightline and story editor for the news magazine, Day One. Tracy has produced documentaries, specials and live town meeting broadcasts for PBS, The Discovery Channel, CNN, Lifetime and CNBC. In addition to Emmy® Awards, she won a Hugo Award, a 2004 Clarion Award and the CINE Golden Eagle for investigative journalism. She has been an adjunct professor in the Leadership and the Arts program at the Sanford Institute for Public Policy.

Helen Fisher
Helen Fisher, PhD, is a biological Anthropologist at Rutgers University. She studies the evolution, brain
systems (fMRI) and cross-cultural patterns of romantic love, mate choice, marriage, adultery, divorce,
gender differences in the brain, personality, temperament, and business personalities. She has written
five internationally best selling books, including WHY HIM? WHY HER?; WHY WE LOVE; and ANATOMY OF LOVE. She lectures worldwide. Among her speeches are those at the World Economic Forum at Davos, TED, United Nations, Smithsonian, Salk Institute, Harvard Medical School and Aspen Institute. She publishes widely in academic and lay journals. For her work in the media, Helen received the American Anthropological Association’s Distinguished Service Award.

SHORT FILM JURY

Mike Judge
Mike Judge is the creator of Beavis and Butt-Head for MTV and King of the Hill for FOX TV. He expanded into writing and directing his own live-action films, Office Space, Idiocracy and Extract. He’s done voices for South Park and acted in Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids movies. Mike recently resurrected Beavis and Butt-Head with 12 new shows for MTV.

Dee Rees
Dee Rees is an alumna of New York University’s graduate film program and a Sundance Institute
Directing Lab Fellow. She’s written and directed several short films including the award-winning Pariah, which screened at over 40 festivals worldwide. Her feature documentary, Eventual Salvation, premiered on the Sundance Channel in 2009, and her debut narrative feature, Pariah, opened the U.S. Dramatic competition at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Dee received a Renew Media Arts Fellowship for her work, and recently completed an endowed residency at Yaddo. Currently, Dee is writing an original screenplay for Focus Features and is also in development on a new television series with HBO. Dee interned on Spike Lee’s films When The Levees Broke and Inside Man.

Shane Smith
Shane Smith has been a programmer, jury member and speaker at film festivals all over the world. He
is currently the Director of Public Programmes at TIFF Bell Lightbox. He previously served as the
Executive Producer, In-flight Entertainment at Spafax Canada Inc., where he oversaw all in-flight
programming for Air Canada. He also was the Director of Programming for the digital TV channels
Movieola: The Short Film Channel and Silver Screen Classics. He was a Short Film Programmer for
the Sundance Film Festival from 2006-2010 and for six years was the Director of the Canadian Film
Centre’s Worldwide Short Film Festival. He is a former Programmer for the Inside Out Festival, a
member of the Organizing Committee of the International Short Film Conference and was formerly on
the Board of Directors of the Centre for Aboriginal Media, presenters of the imagineNATIVE Film
Festival.

For more information on the Sundance Film Festival, visit their festival webpage here.

You can read the full article here.

What strikes us as troubling now is that, several months later, the Iranian government is on the move again via the proposed shut down of the independent Iranian House of Cinema which stands as an integral part in the unity of Iran’s film community.

The House of Cinema, an icon of film for 20 years, would prove a great loss if the sanctions issued by the Iranian Minister of Culture are carried out. According to reports by the Los Angeles Times and media sources in Iran Minister Mohammed Hosseini accused the House of Cinema of operating illegally and/or outside government regulations.

In response to this, House managing director Mohammad-Mehdi Asgarpur was quoted in saying “I believe this letter has no legal weight since disbanding a nongovernmental organization with a verdict issued by the executive power is impossible; however, we are still waiting for the court date, which is on Jan. 11.” Needless to say, if the court rules in favor of the government it will send a lightning rod through the Iranian film community which looks to the House of Cinema as a stable pillar for their art.

The House made many efforts to combat initiatives to force it to close its doors, given the political underpinnings of these attempts. The outcome of this trial will shine yet another spotlight on Iranian cinema as it has promising talent that could potential have to fight even harder to be heard.