During the 2017 annual Sundance Film Festival—which took place January 19 to 29 in Park City, Utah—the U.S. changed presidents. On January 20, Donald Trump took the oath of office and succeeded Barack Obama as president of the United States; in the week that followed, protesters rallied in support of women’s rights and Muslim immigrants in major cities and small towns across the country, including in Park City. By the time the festival wrapped, the mood, according to LA Times film critic Justin Chang, had shifted. As he described on the National Public Radio program Fresh Air, it was like “you went up the mountain in one regime, came down the mountain in another . . . it seemed to be like, film is important, but it’s not all about film.”
CMP-funded films have premiered at major film festivals like Sundance, Tribeca, and Hot Docs; been nationally broadcast on HBO, Showtime, and PBS; and have won significant awards recognizing their impact, including a Peabody Award for investigative journalism (The Newburgh Sting). Two films supported by CMP have also been optioned for narrative remakes: Meet the Patels, bought by Fox Searchlight; and The Eagle Huntress. The latter was picked up for wide release by Sony Pictures Classics, while Fox Animation has rights to an animated version of Aisholpan, the documentary’s 13-year-old subject.
The film also became an example of CMP’s Concierge Philanthropy collaboration with members, as one member approached CMP about creating a program to connect youth to the films that will speak to them, inspired by Romeo Is Bleeding. “CMP then developed our High School Initiative with this member,” Froehle explains, “and launched the program last fall with a youth-created short film in response to [Romeo Is Bleeding], and a community screening of both the feature and the short response piece.”
