Sundance and TED team up for filmmaking award

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The Sundance Institute has partnered up with TED — the nonprofit that conducts conferences to gather visionaries in technology, entertainment and design — to award a filmmaker $125,000 to make a short film about TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra.

Mitra is an educational researcher whose "Hole in the Wall" experiments have shown that children can teach themselves and each other without supervision and other formal teaching — if they're motivated by curiosity and peer interest. Mitra won the $1 million TED Prize for his proposal to "build a school in the Cloud," to use the internet and the shared data of "the Cloud" to let children teach themselves.

The Sundance Institute/TED Prize Filmmaker Award will go toward making a documentary short (under 45 minutes, suitable for Oscar consideration) — and plan for a multi-platform presence for the project in shorter formats (promos, trailer, and a 3-to-5 minute version of the film). The winning filmmaker will have 18 months to complete the project, which will be screened at the TED Long Beach conference the following year.

For details about how to enter for the award, go to the Sundance Institute website.