Sundance to add “NEXT” category for low-no budget films

// September 2nd, 2009 // What's Poppin

I saw this in INDIEWIRE and had to share.

by Peter Knegt
With New Fest Section, Sundance Embracing Low & No Budget Movies
The scene at the Sundance Film Festival.

Photo by Peter Knegt.

In a move aimed at including more low and no budget films, the Sundance Film Festival has announced the creation of a new section for its upcoming 2010 event. Dubbed “Next,” the section which will feature six to eight feature films, “selected for their innovative and original work in low- and no-budget filmmaking.” Festival Director John Cooper made the announcement today, citing “the desire to discover and promote filmmakers forging new ways to tell their stories, limited by resources but uninhibited by creativity.”

As of yesterday, Sundance organizers had already received 4,964 applications and 3,689 films. Submissions for the January festival still being accepted this month.

“Programming an event as important to the cultural landscape as Sundance Film Festival, we feel a responsibility both to represent new creative developments in the field and to contextualize films for our Festival goers,” Cooper said in a statement. “Historically, we have done this quite successfully with documentary, and most recently with New Frontier, ‘saving space’ as it were, to support different trends in storytelling. We want filmmakers to feel encouraged and intrigued by this new section of the Festival. We hope to excite audiences as well as inform a budding industry already investing in new models of distribution.”

A new aesthetic enlisting low-and no-budget filmmaking techniques has been on the rise. With “Next,” Festival programmers hope to provide a platform for filmmakers using new aesthetics enlisting low-and no-budget filmmaking techniques to connect to audiences, industry and press while at the same time “inviting the artists to be a part of an ever-evolving community of filmmakers working outside the system.”

“The filmmakers who are working in this realm and who I have spoken to about this have a ‘creative impatience’ that I find invigorating,” Cooper added. “These are not just the films that have been labeled mumble core…or dogma or even guerilla. They are an emerging counter culture within our counter culture.”

The 2010 Sundance Film Festival will take place January 21 – 31 in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah.