Eric Lavallée

Paul Federbush and former Warner Independent Pictures's head Laura Kim are starting up a new distribution company going by the name of Red Flag Releasing and they'll get the business started with a Sundance doc that ruffled many feathers before anyone even laid eyes on the film. Much like how people invest in the stock market, perhaps the best time for new distribution companies to get into the action is when the industry is at low point, and they'll release a doc film with bite this Spring in Reed Cowan's 8: The Mormon Proposition.

After a lengthy career in genre cinema, Denmark's Nicolas Winding Refn is finding himself in the driver's seat. With a couple of Hollywood options available to him, the filmmaker is now doing donuts around Drive - a Universal project that once had Neil Marshall on board to direct and had Hugh Jackman manning the wheel. Another bit of interesting news is that the helmer will be teaming with Ryan Gosling...

The buyers at Summit Entertainment must be fans of the annual Black List of the Best in Unproduced screenplays as they have just added their third in a little less than half a year. After picking up the top of 2008's list in The Beaver (at the very beginning of production) and setting up shop for Duncan Jones' forthcoming Source Code (a 2007 top 20 spec), the indie distributor which was able to bankroll of three projects due to the Twilight films has bought the North American rights to the (currently in pre-production) film once going by the excellent title of I'm with Cancer.

With the EFM & Berlin in full prep mode, the very believable news that Penelope Cruz would be joining the greatest director in the world is good news for art-house patrons. Lars von Trier humorlessly referred to himself as the best -- I'll defend the Dane by saying he was simply having fun with the media frenzy in Cannes, and if Cruz follows the same mental concourse that Charlotte Gainsbourg might have endured in the filming of Antichrist, then we can be hopeful that Planet Melancholia resembles something closer to Tarkovsky/Pasolini than dystopian examples such as Blindness or The Road.

Survival in the favelas by way of the ballet? That's what the Film Movement folks are proposing this summer as they become the official dance partners with Beadie Finzi's favela-set documentary film which appears to contain a rags-to denouement and could easily mimic the popularity of Mad Hot Ballroom.