The 2010 Sundance Film Festival will feature NEXT, a new section featuring six to eight 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.
The move is likely to particularly benefit those filmmakers who work completely outside of the studio system, the 'independent' arms of which, some would argue, have come to dominate Sundance schedules rather too much in recent years.
This marks the first major change made by Cooper - who stepped into the Festival Director's role earlier this year. He said: "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 contextualise films for our Festival goers.
"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."
Festival staffers refer to the new section with the symbol < = > which they say stands for "less than equals greater than".
Cooper added: "The filmmakers who are working in this realm and who I have spoken to about this have a 'creative impatience' that I find invigorating.
"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 festival has so far received 4,964 applications and 3,689 films for its 2010. Submissions are still being accepted. Visit www.sundance.org/submissions for more information.
