Sundance Institute Selects Eight First-Time Filmmakers for Directors Lab, May 0-June

Frances Bodomo | Annie Silverstein | C sar Cervantes | Kibwe Tavares | Eva Vives | Sandhya Suri | Pippa Bianco | Boots Riley

Los Angeles, CA - Sundance Institute has selected eight first-time filmmakers for its signature Directors Lab, which helped launch the careers of award-winning filmmakers Cary Fukunaga, Dee Rees, Marielle Heller, Benh Zeitlin and Quentin Tarantino. Taking place May 30-June 23 in the mountains of Sundance Resort in Utah, the annual Lab supports the next wave of independent filmmakers exploring new ideas and shaping the future of storytelling.

At the Directors Lab, under the leadership of Sundance Institute Feature Film Program Founding Director Michelle Satter, Labs Director Ilyse McKimmie and the artistic direction of Gyula Gazdag, the Fellows will work with an accomplished group of creative advisors, professional actors and production crews to shoot and edit key scenes from their screenplays. Through this concentrated, hands-on process, the Fellows workshop and make key discoveries about their scripts, collaborate with actors and find a visual storytelling language for their films.

Michelle Satter, Founding Director of the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program, said, Our Directors Lab and other programs play a critical role in discovering diverse artists and launching their careers, and this years filmmakers are our most diverse group ever in terms of their backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. We are thrilled to work with each of them to further develop the most distinctive, singular and timely stories that might otherwise go untold.

Creative advisors include Sundance Institute President & Founder Robert Redford, Joan Darling, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Gyula Gazdag, Stephen Goldblatt, Keith Gordon, David Gordon Green, Randa Haines, Catherine Hardwicke, Azazel Jacobs, Richard Jenkins, So Yong Kim, Kasi Lemmons, Joshua Marston, Lee Percy, Rodrigo Prieto, Nancy Richardson, Ira Sachs, Peter Sollett, Joan Tewkesbury, Dylan Tichenor, Barbara Tulliver, and Bradford Young.

Several films supported by the Feature Film Program premiered earlier this year at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, including Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award-winner The Birth of a Nation, written and directed by Nate Parker, and winner of the Directing Prize, Swiss Army Man, co-written and co-directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as DANIELS. Since 1981, the Feature Film Program has supported an extensive list of leading-edge independent films, including Marielle Heller's Diary of a Teenage Girl, Jonas Carpignano's Mediterranea, Damien Chazelle's Whiplash, Ritesh Batra's The Lunchbox, Ryan Coogler's Fruitvale Station, Haifaa Al Mansour's Wadjda, Lucy Alibar and Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild, Dee Rees' Pariah, and Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know.

Meet the 2016 Directors Lab filmmakers and their projects:

Frances Bodomo / Afronauts (Zambia/U.S.A.): Just after Zambian Independence in 1964, an ingenious group of villagers build a homemade rocket in a wild bid to join the Space Race. 17-year-old astronaut Matha Mwambwa must decide if blasting off in the precarious rocket vindicates her past or just makes her a glorified human sacrifice. Inspired by true events.

Ghanian writer/director Frances Bodomo grew up in Ghana, Norway, and Hong Kong, before moving to New York City to study film at Columbia University (BA) and NYUs Tisch School of the Arts (MFA). Her short films Boneshaker and Afronauts both premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and went on to play various festivals including the Berlinale, Telluride, and New Directors/New Films. She recently directed the short segment Everybody Dies! for the omnibus feature Collective:Unconscious, which premiered at the 2016 SXSW Film Festival. Bodomo is a Sundance Institute | Alfred P. Sloan Fellow.

Annie Silverstein / Bull (U.S.A.): In a near-abandoned subdivision west of Houston, a wayward teen runs headlong into her equally willful and unforgiving neighbor-an aging bullfighter who's seen his best days in the arena. It's a collision that will change them both.

Annie Silverstein is an award-winning filmmaker and youth worker based in Austin, Texas. Her fiction and documentary films have screened at international festivals including Cannes, SXSW, Silverdocs and on PBS Independent Lens. Most recently she wrote and directed Skunk, which won the jury award at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival-Cin fondation. Silverstein is a recipient of the San Francisco Film Society/Kenneth Rainin Foundation Grant for developing her first fiction feature.

C sar Cervantes / Hot Clip (U.S.A.): In the aftermath of their best friend's fatal confrontation with a cop, three Southeast Los Angeles skaters spend 24 hours chasing dreams, making trouble and trying to survive in a community on the verge of exploding.

C sar Cervantes is a first-generation Chicano filmmaker from Maywood, California. His skateboarding do-it-yourself background and whatever-it-takes approach to filmmaking got him into the Emerging Filmmakers Showcase at the Cannes Film Festival, led him to create an after-school film program for inner-city youth with the help of CAA, and put him on tour with the Grammy-winning band La Santa Cecilia as their lead videographer. A Vassar College graduate, Cervantes will make his feature debut with Hot Clip. Cervantes is the first recipient of the Feature Film Program Latino Fellowship.

Kibwe Tavares / The Kitchen (United Kingdom): Raised in London's first favela housed in an abandoned Council high-rise, known as the Kitchen, Es commits smash-and-grab thefts as a way of redistributing the wealth to the community who took him in. When the inhabitants are threatened with eviction by the police, Es is tasked with a high-stakes heist that pits him against the

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