Last Week of November - Sundance 2013 Line Up, Empowering Female Filmmakers

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Left to right: Francesco Rulli, Fereshteh Forough, Alexey Levchenko, and me.

This week, Sundance Film Festival unraveled its 2013 line-up. The films are grouped under four different competition categories: U.S. Dramatic, U.S. Documentary, World Cinema Dramatic, and World Cinema Documentary. The festival also presents an out-of-competition section called NEXT, showcasing pure, bold works distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to storytelling. After reading about the films, I started contacting some of the filmmakers for interview requests and promotional opportunities on Film Annex. A filmmaker I'm particularly excited about is Eliza Hittman, whose short film, Forever's Gonna Start Tonight, premiered at Sundance in 2010. I admire Hittman's honest, narrative style and the subject matters she explores. Her short seems to be available only through The Standard Print, and I hope to present it on Film Annex one day.  

Speaking of women directors, I'll be focusing on introducing Film Annex to female filmmakers in Afghanistan and Central/South Asia in collaboration with my colleague, Fereshteh Forough, who has recently moved to New York from Afghanistan. I'm excited about expanding our reach and focusing on female storytellers who might not have access to the same opportunities as male filmmakers do in their countries. This is the first step towards women's empowerment through movies. A more extensive blog about this is coming soon. 

During the week, I continued adding new films to the featured section on our homepage, raising the number of videos in rotation to 242. I'm adding more films to the list every day, selecting from classics as well as new submissions. The final catalog will be a combination of the best narrative, animation, experimental, and documentary work on Film Annex. 

Going through our movies inspires me with new ideas each time I do it. Today, I thought about starting a new film promotion series called Experimental Tuesdays upon seeing some crazy, experimental film work by our filmmakers.  I think Tuesdays kind of suffer from being a not-so-special day. They sort of drag... Why not make them more exciting by highlighting some insane works of the imagination? More on this as the idea develops. I also thought about starting an interview series with festival directors to explore how film festivals are doing these days and what their real influence is on a filmmaker's career. I'll be sending out my first questions next week, so get ready some revelation there.

This week, I also worked with my colleague, Jennifer Bourne, to create multiple choice Tumblr questions for our software program, Examer. You can refer to my previous blogs to learn more about how Project Examer has been unfolding and our efforts to teach Afghani students about social media. Another exciting development was my correspondence with the Future Shorts team about the promotion and distribution of new films on our online film network.

Last, but not least, I added a new review to my Recommended Film of the Week series. You can read about this week's film, Attack of the Giant Vegetable Monsters, here.



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