New film projects by the likes of Aktan Arym Kubat (The Light Thief), Athina Rachel Tsangari (ATTENBERG), Taika Waititi (Eagle vs Shark), Kelly Reichardt (Meek's Cutoff), Úrszula Antoniak (Code Blue and Nothing Personal), Quentin Dupieux (Rubber and the Sundance selected Wrong), Florin Serban (If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle), Ruben Östlund (Play) and Aditya Assarat (Wonderful Town) are among the 36 projects participating in Rotterdam’s 29th co-production market CineMart (where a whopping 850 potential co-financiers add coin to future projects).
Some major Venice, TIFF, NYFF titles have been added to Sundance including high quality premium titles in Attenberg, Meek's Cutoff and Submarine. Gregg Araki will once again have had the chance to showcase his films at top fest on the circuit, his latest film Kaboom which was shown at Cannes and TIFF will find it's final fest presentation in Park City. Denis Villeneuve will deliver one extra push before the Oscars (Incendies is a top tier pick among all the nominees). Mumblecore member Joe Swanberg is also in the section but with a world premiere of his film.
Knowing Quentin Tarantino's appreciation for films that are "out there": if I had to do some really early predictions here, I'd say that the Gold and Silver Lion front-runners are in Alex De La Iglesia's bizarro fantasy film A Sad Trumpet Ballad, Pablo Larrain's Post Mortem or Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg (a filmmaker we recently profiled in our American New Wave 25 series - she spent more than a decade in Austin's film scene). I'd also add put Abdellatif Kechiche's Black Venus high up on any awards list, especially the Lido - it's a film I've been pegging for Venice since the film went into production.
Will one of our most anticipated films for 2010 calender year, end up being pushed back to 2011? If you go by what Zoe Kazan is saying (she's on the junket tour for Bradley Rust Gray's The Exploding Girl), it would appear so.
What do Juan Antonio Bayona, Bernardo Bertolucci, Guillermo del Toro, Ken Loach, Jacques Audiard, François Ozon and Wong Kar-Wai have in common? They all got their starts at the far-end of the Croisette in the smallest of the sections called Critic's Week. The section specializes in mostly first time, and sometimes sophomore films from new talent.