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“Patti Cake$” has lived up to the hype. After its Eccles Theater premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday afternoon, the film scored two huge standing ovations, and another for breakout star Danielle Macdonald.

Patti Cake$ just dropped a hip hop bombshell on the Eccles. This movie could be huge. #sundance pic.twitter.com/Oqf0hcZpMA

— erickohn (@erickohn) January 23, 2017

This moment was a long and winding journey for writer-director Geremy Jasper. To look at him, you would never guess his alter ego would be Patricia Dombroski (aka Patti Cake$, aka Killer P, played by Macdonald), a 23-year-old, heavy-set Jersey girl with dreams of rap stardom. Jasper is tall, extremely easygoing, and has the style of a Williamsburg creative. In his 20s, he was the front man for a popular indie rock band, The Fever, and starred in Benh Zeitlin’s breakout short, “Glory at Sea.”

Read More: The 2017 IndieWire Sundance Bible: Every Review,...

Later tonight, close to 2,000 moviegoers will fill Howard Gilman Opera House in Brooklyn to watch Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life,” set to a live score played by a 110-piece orchestra and choir. It’s the seventh live score production by the New York-based Wordless Music Orchestra, which has previously staged live music productions of other modern day classics like “There Will Be Blood” and “Under the Skin.”

For the founder of Wordless Music, Ronen Givony, the need to create a heightened sense of occasion with a live event is vital in the age of Netflix and Spotify.

Read More: Howard Shore, Composer for Cronenberg, ‘Spotlight’ and Scorsese, on the Creation of Diverse Scores

“I think it’s fair to say that whether it’s an orchestra concert or a rock concert or a movie, it seems like especially in New York, the simple act of going out and seeing...

This year is the 20th anniversary of the Slamdance Film Festival. For those who don’t know about Slamdance, it runs during the same time as the Sundance Film Festival, and all of the films are true indies. Sundance has its fair share, but you won’t see any famous actors in a Slamdance movie. However, you could see the debut work from an up-and-coming director. Slamdance alums include Christopher Nolan (Following), Marc Forster (Loungers), Jared Hess (Peluca), Lena Dunham (Dealing), Benh Zeitlin (Egg), and Lynn Shelton (We Go Way Back). If I had time to swing by Slamdance, I would because while it’s definitely a crapshoot, you could end up seeing something entirely unexpected and worth championing. Hit the jump for a list of films playing in competition at this year’s Slamdance Film Festival, which runs from January 17th – 23rd in Park City, Utah at the Treasure Mountain Inn.

One of this film year’s biggest discoveries has been Beasts of the Southern Wild, starring first-time actors Quvenzhané Wallis and Dwight Henry, as directed by first time helmer Benh Zeitlin. The aesthetic-driven indie film is about a father (Henry) and his young daughter (Wallis) who refuse to leave their hurricane-effected land near New Orleans called The Bathtub.

Though captured by a camera spiritually embedded into the unique territory, Zeitlin is originally from Connecticut. The 29-year-old studied film at Wesleyan University, which also has alumni like Avengers director Joss Whedon and blockbuster guy Michael Bay.

I sat down with Zeitlin in a roundtable interview to discuss the crafting of this film, his co-written score, and the key to getting an eight-year-old to act without turning her into a puppet.

Beasts of the Southern Wild opens in Chicago on July 6.

Before the final product was taken to the Sundance Film Festival,...

Chicago – If director Benh Zeitlin had written a list of the most outlandishly formidable challenges that a film crew could ever possibly face, he could’ve easily come up with an outline for “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” Loosely based on Lucy Alibar’s play, “Juicy and Delicious,” the film pays tribute to the indomitable spirit of New Orleans citizens as they continue to defy the odds.

It’s that same spirit that appears to have fueled this tremendously ambitious picture, the first feature made by the self-dubbed, “Independent Filmmaking Army” known as “Court 13.” Set in a tight-knit southern village known as the Bathtub, the tale is viewed through the eyes of a strong-willed six-year-old, Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis). As her father, Wink (Dwight Henry), grows weak with illness, environmental catastrophes flood the village while unleashing an assortment of fearsome prehistoric creatures. Thus, Hushpuppy embarks on a journey of survival that...

For a while there Benh Zeitlin seemed like the piped piper of New Orleans. One after another, someone else I went to college with would move down there for a few weeks or months, and you didn't even have to ask what they were doing there. They were just "working with Benh," either on the short film Glory At Sea or later on Beasts of the Southern Wild, the handcrafted coming-of-age story that premiered at Sundance in January and opens in theaters this week. Benh graduated from Wesleyan University in 2004, two years before I did, and not to try and sound too cool, but we all knew how great he was before you did. His senior thesis film Egg was unlike anything else that anyone had made, striking and creepy and intricately detailed, an adaptation of Moby Dick featuring stop-motion animation and three human actors as "bird children" and a...

Like it or not, filmmaking is undeniably a director's medium. It wasn't always like that, of course: it was only the coming of the auteur theory in the 1950s and 1960s that popularized the idea of the director as the person responsible for all that was great and terrible about a picture. And while anyone who's worked in film knows that it's a collaborative medium, there's still no better way of seeing where the form might be going in the next few years than by looking at the directors who've been making splashes of late.

So, hot on the heels of our On The Rise pieces focusing on actors, actresses and screenwriters, we've picked out ten directors who've arrived in a big way in the last year or so, and look set for even greater things in the near future. Any tips of your own? Let us know in the comments section below.

The sixth annual Indie Grits Festival, hosted by the Nickelodeon Theatre in Columbia, South Carolina, is actually more than just a film festival. Much, much more. From April 20-28, there will be film screenings, food tastings, bands playing, theater performances, a craft fair, a technology conference and oh so much more.

As for the films, though, every night — and a few afternoons — of Indie Grits is jam-packed with unique and creative independent feature-length movies and short films. Screenings take place at two locations: At the original Nickelodeon theater at 937 Main St. and at the New Nick location just up the road at 1607 Main St.

The fest opens with Bill and Turner Ross’ narrative feature Tchoupatoulis, about three brothers who sneak into New Orleans on their own to witness the visual spectacles the city has to offer; and the documentary Dragons of Jim Green, directed by Randy M. Salo, about a...

• One week before the masses descend upon Sundance’s 25th, a dozen projects will get combed over by some people not wearing white coats -- the Screenwriters Lab matches future voices of cinema with contemporary folk who’ve paved the way before them. This year’s lab projects includes Todd Rohal's newest project after the Diy success of The Guatemalan Handshake, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's Allen Ginsberg project titled Howl, and Mishna Wolff takes her forthcoming book release (I’m Down) and makes a screenplay out of it. Here’s a Cc of the press release of the projects and the lucky creators behind them. The projects selected for the 2009 January Screenwriters Lab are: Beasts Of The Southern Wild /Benh Zeitlin (co-writer/director) and Lucy Alibar (co-writer), U.S.A. Fuga Mortis /Kirill Mikhanovsky (writer/director), U.S.A./Russia Howl /Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (co-writers/co-directors), U.

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