Today co-directors Cameron Bailey and Piers Handling of the Toronto International Film Festival announce the first batch of titles that are the make-up of the 36th edition. Today's the pair will read off mostly Gala screening mentions (our Blake Williams will be LIVE tweeting), which in turn give us a strong indication as to what will be shown in Venice and what Telluride, NYFF and BFI London Film Festivals might salvage/lasso as their own.
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.
If you ask me: this was a fight between an underdog in Winter’s Bone and a favorite in The Kids Are All Right (Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo). The underdog won.
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.
Andrea Arnold, from Fish Tank, Red Road and Wasp fame, will be hitting Wuthering Heights next, but she might be following that up with another original piece called The Cleaner. Peter Strickland (see pic above) who made waves last year with his film Katalin Varga, will be going to Italy for his next project - a horror film called who is developing The Berberian Sound Studio.