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 In August 2017, Swedish journalist Kim Wall was brutally murdered and dismembered by self-proclaimed Danish inventor Peter Madsen in his homemade submarine. At the time Australian documentarian Emma Sullivan was following Madsen in order to tell a completely different story about the eccentric self-made inventor’s Rocket-Madsen’s Space Laboratory.

After surprising the world with his stellar performance as Pablo Escobar in Narcos, for which he received a Golden Globes nomination in 2016, Wagner Moura disappeared as an actor until last September, when The Wasp Network, not still released commercially, was shown in Venice. So it is a big surprise to see him in his first leading role in English in Sergio, a Netflix production that was part of the Premieres program at the Sundance Film Festival, where he also was a member of the International Jury.

For over 40 years the Golden Globes have recorded famous and celebrated actresses, actors and filmmakers.   Born in Liverpool, England, and raised between Canada, London and New York Kim Cattrall won a GoldenGlobe in 2003 for her work in Sex and the City and was nominated again in 2000, 2001 and 2004.

Writer and director Veronica Chen presented her feature film debut, Smokers Only, at Sundance in 2002. Now, the Argentinian filmmaker is back with her film High Tide – a film about female sexuality, class, and power.

In the early 1990s, children’s cable network Nickelodeon, seeking animated programming different from the medium’s traditional powerhouse providers, opened itself up to outside pitches and turned to a hyperactive, highly imaginative upstart, John Kricfalusi, giving him a shot with a six-episode order for Ren & Stimpy, a TV show about an emotionally imbalanced chihuahua and his good-natured but dimwitted feline best friend. When the series premiered in August 1991, it was an out-of-the-gate smash hit, breaking rating records, immediately challenging The Simpsons (then just entering its third season) for domination among animation fans, and eventually raking in, at its peak, several billion dollars in merchandising per year.

Since the onset of the Arab Spring, the Sundance Film Festival has been a platform for in-depth documentaries. From Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and the Yemen, audiences have been taken behind the news headlines and introduced to the people who risk their lives facing brutal regimes for freedom and democracy.

Austrian actress Valerie Pachner was surprised when she got the role in Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life. “I still have this feeling of what a wonderful coincidence that Terrence Malick decided to do a film about an Austrian story with German-speaking actors,” Pachner told HFPA journalist Barbara Gasser.

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For the third year in a row,  Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) hosted the panel Women Breaking Barriers: How Far Have We Come? at the SundanceTV Headquarters. Moderated by HFPA member Elisabeth Sereda, this year's panelists represented diverse aspects of the entertainment industry: actress Kerry Washington, director and filmmaker Julie Taymor, actress, producer, writer, and director Frankie Shaw, and filmmaker and #1 New York Times Bestselling author Lisa Jackson.

In recent years, Sundance has drawn quite a few politicians and activists to the snow-capped mountains of Park City, most notably Al Gore and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the former a two-time producer of environmental documentaries, the latter the subject of a doc on her life. This year it was none lesser than the former First Lady, New York Senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who flew in from New York (on a commercial flight, not private), to promote Hillary, a four-part, four-hour documentary that will start airing on Hulu in March.