Search results for: Andrew Lau

IFP have announced the lucky ten projects that have been selected to participate in this year’s narrative edition of Independent Filmmaker Labs, which officially started yesterday. Among the selected projects, we find a couple we've already been tracking and will probably be seeing this coming January in Park City. We have Dee Rees' Pariah, Andrew Dosunmu's Restless City, the much anticipated Yelling To The Sky from Victoria Mahoney and I'm adding Brady Kiernan's Stuck Between Stations as a film to watch out for.

From the beginning, I wanted to craft the film as a sort of Memento mori piece. I was very interested in Vanitas paintings from the 16th and 17th century. These paintings were crafted usually as still life and meant as a reminder of the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death.

One look at the filmmaker names below, and it appears as if the Sundance alumni have come out in droves. We find a known variety of filmmakers such as Spike Jonze (Being John Malcovich), Ira Sachs (Married Life), Nicholas Jasenovec (Paper Hearts), James Franco and the Zellner bros. who have dabbled this year in the short form while working in between their feature film projects.

You can always count on Park City at Midnight section to deliver one groundbreaking film. It's hard to predict which one, but I'd go with "concept" over such things as cast, aesthetics or production budget. This theory isn't off the charts when you consider Black Dynamite, The Blair Witch Project and Saw got their starts in this section. Of the 8 selected below, I'm familiar with Rodrigo Cortes's Buried (which reminds me of the torment that the Dutch film The Vanishing caused me) and Vincent Natali's Splice which I believe received its world preem at Sitges.

The good news is that a handful of films that I predicted that would be at the fest and that I wanted to see (Blue Valentine, Happythankyoumoreplease, Hesher, Howl, Sympathy for Delicious and Winter's Bone) have indeed been selected.