Category: media

“In 2013, Australian documentarian Anna Broinowski was granted a rare chance to research North Korea’s cloaked and powerful propaganda film industry. … [This excerpt] from her book Aim High in Creation! chronicles the bizarre final days of Broinowski’s North Korean film production boot camp, when she was unexpectedly cast as an ‘evil American wife’ in a film about the 1968 capture of the U.S. spy ship, the Pueblo.”

Back in October, NatWest announced that it would no longer provide services to RT, the Russian-government-sponsored news channel. Russian officials promptly cried “Censorship!” and threatened to retaliate against the BBC’s operations in Russia. Now NatWest (which is owned largely by the British government) has announced a settlement.

Women earned a number of barrier-breaking Oscar nominations this year, but overall representation of women in Oscar-nominated behind-the-scenes categories fell two percent according to a report from the Women’s Media Center published Monday.

Well, this is cheery: “Judging by the totals in Park City this year, buyers are feeling optimistic. Very optimistic. Whether it’s traditional players like Searchlight and Sony Pictures Classics, newer movers-and-shakers such as Amazon and Netflix or even upstarts like Neon and FilmRise, wallets have been opening up over the last week at Sundance.”

The response to Friday’s immigration and refugee orders came fast at the awards show in LA: They “kicked off with Ashton Kutcher welcoming viewers and ‘everyone in airports that belong in my America. You are a part of the fabric of who we are. And we love you and we welcome you.'”

Founder Robert Redford: “We try to stay away from politics, per se. We stay focused on what are the stories being told by artists.” The stories being told, though, could easily be seen as political.

A visit to new, state-of-the-art projection booths proves that film – unlike digital – has an ineffable quality that seems to capture the soul, or at least the devotion, of those who know anything about the subject.

“It’s easy to caricature the festival — earnest docs, white-people-problem ensemble dramedies and the like — yet Sundance often proves itself capable not just of launching interesting careers, but also of nudging the needle forward when it comes to onscreen diversity and representation.”

“The Philadelphia cable giant achieved a milestone in a sea of industry turbulence, adding a net 80,000 cable TV subscribers in the fourth quarter and 161,000 for the full year — defying the trend of customer cord-cutting that has concerned Wall Street. Comcast now has nearly 23 million cable TV subscribers, gaining on rival AT&T.”