Sundance Institute is an organization devoted to discovering, developing, and training new filmmakers, composers, and playwrights. The American actor and director Robert Redford founded the nonprofit institute in 1981 in Park City, Utah. (See Redford, Robert .)
The institute is best known for the Sundance Film Festival, an annual motion-picture exhibition and competition held during January. The festival concentrates on independent filmmaking—that is, movies made outside the big-budget, commercially oriented Hollywood film industry.
The Sundance Film Festival screens more than 100 feature films and 60 short films each year. The festival gives awards in a variety of categories. Grand Jury Prizes are given in the categories of documentary and dramatic film. Awards for cinematography, directing, screenwriting, short filmmaking, world cinema, and Latin American cinema are given each year. The festival also gives the Freedom of Expression Award to a film that covers an issue of social concern, and an audience award based on a public vote.
The Sundance Institute offers various film writing, editing, and production programs, including the Sundance Writers Fellowship Program, the Native Screenwriters Workshop for American Indian filmmakers, and the Sundance Institute International Program to support filmmaking in Europe and Latin America. Other projects include the Sundance Online Film Festival, a program to showcase new films developed for the Internet. The Gen-Y Project teaches young people the basics of film writing, editing, and producing.
The Sundance Theater Program offers a three-week summer workshop and produces plays at two of the institute’s outdoor theaters. The Composers Lab, founded in 1998, offers fellowships to composers to participate in a one-week workshop that teams composers with filmmakers. The festival maintains an archive of independent films at the University of California in Los Angeles.
