Eric Lavallée

In our next profile, we feature a filmmaker who began his career at exceptional, four years of age. Dash Shaw was probably the kid with those crazy Crayola kits, and if you've guessed right - his entry into film is by way of his background in comics and illustration. In 2010, the Sundance Institute invited Shaw for both the Screenwriters and Directors lab where he workshopped the hand-drawn, 2D animated tale titled, The Ruined Cast which should hit film festival circuit sometime in 2011.

Within a short time span, Andrew Renzi has built himself a sharp film resume. Working in different producing capacities on such films as Antonio Campos' Afterschool, Mark Ruffalo's Sundance winner Sympathy for Delicious and a pair that we've featured in our New Wave list in Jody Lee Lipes (Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same) and Alistair Banks Griffin (Two Gates of Sleep - see pic of Renzi working on actor David Call), Renzi is an up-and-coming producer who has a knack for sizing up talent beyond the pages of a script.

If you haven't heard of Reed Morano before, then you'll surely have no choice but to be aware of this workaholic come January of next year. Working back to back on Victoria Mahoney's Yelling to the Sky , Elgin James' Little Birds and So Yong Kim's For Ellen, means this in-demand Director of Photography has a stovetop full of menu items for Park City in 2011.

M. Blash's Lying made it to Cannes, but it failed to make much of a splash anywhere else. Benefitting from a name cast in thesps Chloe Sevigny and Jena Malone, it took me a couple of tries to work through the denseness of the quasi-drama. Bobby Bukowski's muted colors and the applied improvisational technique were perhaps the film's most difficult hurdle to overcome.

Tucked away at the other end of the Croisette is the Cannes sidebar section called the Critic's Week. At most, the selection committee picks ten features in total from first and second time filmmakers, so one could argue that the films selected for this competition are pretty damn special. It took Detroit native David Robert Mitchell about eight years to fully realize his creation, and if we base ourselves on the reception The Myth of the American Sleepover received at SXSW (where it claimed the Special Jury Prize for Best Ensemble) then the future looks rosy for both the filmmaker and the coming-of-age dramedy.