|
Big names at Sundance festival
29/11/2005 12:44 - (SA)
David Germain
Los Angeles - Ashley Judd, Robert Downey jun, Rosario Dawson, Paul Giamatti, Maggie Gyllenhaal and singer Tom Waits are among the stars appearing in movies competing for top honours at January's Sundance Film Festival.
On Monday, festival organisers announced 64 films that will play at the Park City, Utah, festival that runs January 19-29, including A Guide to Recognising Your Saints, starring Downey, Dawson, Chazz Palminteri and Dianne Wiest in a drama set on the tough 1980s streets of New York City's Astoria neighbourhood.
That film is among 16 that will play in Sundance's US dramatic competition, whose highlights in recent festivals have included In the Bedroom, American Splendor, Napoleon Dynamite and Garden State.
Overseen by Robert Redford's Sundance Institute, the festival is the nation's top showcase for independent film.
The competition also features Come Early Morning, with actress Joey Lauren Adams making her directing debut with a drama about a self-destructive Southern woman that stars Judd, Tim Blake Nelson, Diane Ladd and Stacey Keach; SherryBaby, with Gyllenhaal in the story of a woman adjusting to life after prison; Giamatti, Michael Pitt and Michelle Williams in Hawk Is Dying, about an auto upholsterer spicing up his life by training a red-tailed hawk; and Wristcutters: A Love Story, with Waits, Patrick Fugit, Shannon Sossamon and Jake Busey in an afterlife fantasy about people who have committed suicide.
Idiosyncratic quality
Sundance has produced a number of populist hits in recent years, but festival director Geoffrey Gilmore said the range of competition films this time has a more daring, idiosyncratic quality akin to Sundance's early days.
"It's a festival that very much kind of underscores for me what independent filmmaking is," Gilmore said. "It's an independent filmmaking that is not going to be mistaken by anybody for films that come out of Hollywood. The kind of risk-taking, the kind of storytelling, the kind of originality, the films have a kind of surprising quality that takes us back to our roots."
Among 16 films contending for the top US documentary prize will be American Blackout, director Ian Inaba's examination of voting troubles for blacks in Florida and Ohio in recent presidential elections; The World According to Sesame Street, Linda Goldstein Knowlton and Linda Hawkins Costigan's chronicle of the venerable children's show; Thin, Lauren Greenfield's portrait of four women battling anorexia and bulimia; and Wide Awake, Alan Berliner's account of his struggle with insomnia.
Dramatic entries
The US documentary competition also has two films relating to Iraq: Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends, Patricia Foulkrod's look at US military training, the war in Iraq and how it affects soldiers coming home; and Iraq in Fragments, James Longley's examination of Iraqis living amid the war and occupation.
Sundance's world-cinema dramatic competition features the Brazilian film House of Sand, starring Fernanda Montenegro (a best-actress Academy Award nominee for Central Station), the life story of a woman in a remote region of Brazil over three generations; One Last Dance, a hit man tale from Singapore featuring Francis Ng and Harvey Keitel; and Grbavica, a film out of Bosnia-Herzegovina about a woman and her daughter coping with the aftermath of the Bosnian war.
World-documentary contenders include the Israeli film 5 Days, a look at the evacuation of 8 000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip; the Japanese entry Dear Pyongyang, the story of a Korean-Japanese daughter probing her father's undying loyalty to North Korea; and Britain's Glastonbury, a look at the 30-year history of England's annual Glastonbury music festival.
Sundance was to announce its star-studded premiere line-up and other festival films later in the week.
- AP
|
South Africa
