Search results for: Adam Leon

With big names like Cronenberg and Polley already announced a couple of weeks ago, it came time this morning to announced the rest of the home team for the Toronto International Film Festival. This morning, they filled in some of the gaps in the Special Presentations, Vanguard, and Real to Reel sections, and at the same time presented the full line-ups for their Canada First! and Short Cuts programmes, the former highlighting feature debuts, and the latter comprised of a whopping 43 Canadian short films running anywhere from 4 to 28 minutes long.

While last year we got such items as Monsters, Our Day Will Come and Adam Wingard's A Horrible Way to Die (he returns to the line-up this year in the Midnight Madness section), this edition appears to be a cut above, they've got a pair of excellent features we caught back in Cannes with Joachim Trier's Oslo, August 31 (Un Certain Regard) and Justin Kurzel's Snowtown (Critics' Week). A highly touted item from Venice has also made the cut, and we're especially glad that we'll be able to see Tahar Rahim violently and emotionally lose it in Love and Bruises - Lou Ye's first film in another language and perhaps his "comeback" film of sorts.

Let me toot my own horn a bit. Of the 16 selected films out of 1,102 submissions, I accurately predicted 12. Out of the four that didn't fly on my radar we find American New Wave 25 selected Sean Durkin, who will make it back to back years in Park City. He featured the marvelous, creepy Mary Last Seen there, and would start lensing Martha Marcy May Marlene in the summer...but my thinking was he was Cannes-bound with this one...he may still be, but Sundance is world preem launching pad for the pic.

Big congrats goes to the producers Frederick Thornton, Laura Ragsdale, Sierra Leoni and helmer Mike Ott whose Littlerock - a film that played at the San Francisco, Torino, Vienna and AFI Fest festivals receives a pretty sweet upstart package: a one week showing at the Cinema Village, and other cash prizes including some theatrical release strategy help from the fine folks at Donna Daniels PR.

An ode to last year's big winner Kathryn Bigelow, the 20th Annual Gotham Independent Film Awards were announced this afternoon and Debra Granik’s backwoods drama “Winter’s Bone” leads all the nominations with a total of three, while Lena Dunham (Tiny Furniture) and Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are All Right) each end up with a pair of noms reminding us that there is some definite indiegrrrl power rising to the occasion this year.