President Obama is magical. How else to explain how he found time in his busy pre-inauguration weekend to attend the Sundance Film Festival? He saw some films, attended some parties, pitched a high-concept movie idea and even met Steven Soderbergh, who admits he didn’t vote for the guy but wishes him luck. Filmmakers Jesse Epstein and Natalie Difford, of Chicken & Egg Pictures, managed to document our new commander-in-chief in Park City just before he was due in Washington for the swearing-in ceremony.
Okay, the real Barack Obama wasn’t there. Instead, the video short features an Obama action figure, one of the many popular products available last week in the great merchandization of Obama (one of these figures sits in my apartment, too, so I’m not judging). But the toy does at least represent the spirit of Obama, which was certainly present at Sundance throughout. That final moment is not staged; many festivalgoers abandoned screening rooms to see the inauguration. And no coverage of the fest was complete without reference to the concurrence of events.
Maybe one day the real Obama will find time to attend the festival. Sundance vet Al Gore can bring him.
A prolific director of intimate, vitrolic, globally minded narrative shorts, Topaz Adizes got a taste of star studded Hollywood productions, having worked on Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, before embarking on a terrific run of directorial efforts, including City (2006) and Letting Go (2008). Currently at work on his first feature, a globe trotting multi-strand piece titled Americana, he’s at Sundance this year with a short initially envisioned as a passage in that longer film, Trece anos, which can be seen above. We discuss the usual after the jump. …Read more
The cat is out of the bag for Paper Hearts, a new movie starring Michael Cera about his real-life relationship with actress Charlyne Yi (Knocked Up). The part-doc, part-scripted comedy was apparently hoping to slip into the 2009 Sundance Film Festival completely under the radar in order to keep expectations in check. Now we’re all talking about it, and it’s sure to be one of the hottest tickets in Park City (as long as it’s indeed selected for the fest). Other titles expected to be named next week for the Sundance slate include the Ashton Kutcher starrer Spread, the Nick Hornby-scripted An Education and Antoine Fuqua’s Brooklyn’s Finest.
In other European cinema news, due to the current economy, both the San Sebastian and CineKid film festivals are on the verge of going out of business.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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