The annual TFT Reception in Park City, during the Sundance Film Festival, had a new look in 2013.

Produced for the first time in partnership with leading entertainment news website The Wrap, this highly anticipated event had a new venue at the refurbished Claim Jumper Hotel on Main Street, where a lavish CAA party took place the night before.

More the 400 festival guests attended the event, with a line winding out the door.

“This year’s reception was dedicated to our awe-inspiring alumni, who have made great strides in their humanistic approach to storytelling, with many of their films shown at this year’s festival,” stated Teri Schwartz, dean of the School. “It was with great pleasure that we hosted our annual event with The Wrap, a cutting edge and forward-thinking online news source, providing an opportunity for our alumni, industry professionals, and tastemakers to interact and mingle with one another.”

The dean’s co-host at the event, Wrap co-founder and CEO Sharon Waxman, [SHARON WAXMAN QUOTE]

Guests at the reception included two members of TFT’s Executive Board, Turner Broadcast Systems CEO Phil Kent and Participant Media Chief Executive Jim Berk. They were joined by such long-time industry innovators and friends of TFT as producer Ron Yerxa (“Little Miss Sunshine”), a frequent participant and honoree at the School’s year-end Film Festival, Slated CEO Duncan Cork and Chairman Stephen Paternot, and Bob Berney, founder of the newly relaunched Picturehouse.

The tone of the event was just as convivial but with a younger and more intellectual crowd, with several guests slated to participate in the Monday night TFT/Wrap panel discussion “How to Make and Sell Your Independent Film in the Digital Age,” including Scilla Andreen, the CEO of IndieFlix, and director and producer Richard Rosenthal, founder of Whitewater Films.

TFT alums enjoying this annual get-together included PGA Award-nominated producer and director Marius Markevicius MFA ’02 (“The Other Dream Team”), screenwriter, alumna and faculty member Felicia D. Henderson MA ”04, producer Giacun Caduff MFA ’08 and UCLA Producers Program alumna Ella-Pauline Franklin, representing the lauded short film “To the Bone,” about undocumented immigrants, which played across town at Slamdance.

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