Eric Lavallée

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.

A good film producer hires the right personnel and makes sure the production doesn't go over budget. A great film producer does that and supports talented new voices. You could say that Kyle Martin appears to often be at the right place at the right time.

Sweat, money and no tears is how I would describe the journey of our next featured new voice in indie film. I mentioned this filmmaker in my predictions for last year's Sundance, but Victoria Mahoney's feature film debut, Yelling to the Sky was (part of the Sundance Screenwriters Lab class of 2006 with Sin Nombre, Lake Tahoe and Treeless Mountain) still in post.

If Sundance is the "Super Bowl" event for burgeoning local filmmakers hoping to first get noticed, then imagine how it must feel to be presenting your first feature at the "World Cup" of film festivals. If you're a regular reader on the site, then you might remember us profiling Alistair Banks Griffin prior to him premiering his directorial debut Two Gates of Sleep at the Cannes Film Festival.