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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.

A single Greyhound bus is the connecting link of The Glorias, the new movie by Julie Taymor (Titus, Across the Universe, Frida), about feminist, activist, icon Gloria Steinem. Based on Steinem’s 2015 memoir My Life on the Road, the film shows her portrayed by four different actresses at four different stages of her life.

This weekend’s global box office sales were severely diminished by the outbreak of the SARS-like coronavirus in China and its rapid spread to neighboring countries and beyond. Authorities in the PRC ordered the closure of all movie theaters and the cancellation of New Year’s celebrations in an effort to contain the virus, whose mortality and rate of transmission is, as yet, unclear.

Beginning in 1952 when the Cecil B. deMille Award was presented to its namesake visionary director, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has awarded its most prestigious prize 66 times.

Carey Mulligan is Cassie, the protagonist in Promising Young Woman which some at Sundance have called a brilliant #metoo-inspired answer to the spate of films centering on toxic male rage. In the film directed by Emerald Fennel, the Killing Eve showrunner, Cassie turns the tables on the men who normalize predatory behavior.

The crowd that packed the Sundance screening of Summertime at the MARC Theater in Park City was one of the most stoked in memory. Mostly because at least half the audience seemed to be made up by either cast, crew or friends of Carlos Lopez Estrada’s exuberant and experiential poetry-driven film.