Joining these selections which I posted about 12 hours ago, this year's Midnight Madness is definitely heavy in U.S genre films which include Brad Anderson's not so well kept secret The Vanishing on 7th Street, James Wan's Insidious and the lesser known Stake Land from Jim Mickle.
We often hear about the Sundance Labs for screenwriters and directors, but don't worry folks, producers aren't being neglected, in fact the Sundance Institute have a pretty good initiative for the next generation of producers. The Sundance Institute announced a series of initiatives designed to support independent producers in feature film and documentary.
Doc programmer Thom Powers has assembled what appears to be a vintage offering this year, literally a who's who from the documentary field with world preems from Naomi Kawase, Errol Morris (see pic), Ondi Timoner, Alex Gibney, Kim Longinotto and Werner Herzog, while adding to the mix a foursome of must see documentaries from Cannes with Charles Ferguson's Inside Job, Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia for the Light, Janus Metz's Armadillo and Frederick Wiseman's Boxing Gym.
A fan of book to film adaptations, after previously being tipped to direct Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book and Joe Hill's Heart Shaped Box, Neil Jordan has now set his sights on a feature adaptation of Paul Murray's Skippy Dies, a set in Ireland, dark comedy that will be set up by Number 9 Films' Stephen Woolley and Elizabeth Karlsen and James Flynn's Littlewave Film Productions.
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.