Two additions to the deal chart report: after days of negotiating with several companies, Nanette Burstein has finally sold American Teen to Paramount Vantage. Also, Isaac Julien’s Derek has been acquired for US distribution and worldwide sales by Andrew Hurwitz’ Film Sales Company. See the full Sundance 2008 deals chart here.
Very, very early tomorrow morning, the Spout team will decamp for Park City, Utah, where we will spend the next week plus covering the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. I hope to see somewhere between 20-30 films before coming back to New York, but here’s a look at five of the titles in competition that I’m most excited about. Tomorrow, I’ll post about the films in the Spectrum, Premieres and Midnight sidebars that I can’t wait to see.
American Teen (directed by Nanette Burstein. Documentary Competition)
Excerpt From the Official Synopsis: “American Teen intimately follows the lives of four teenagers in one small town in Indiana through their senior year of high school. Using cinema vérité footage, interviews, and animation, it presents a candid portrait of being 17 and all that goes with it. We see the insecurities, the cliques, the jealousies, the first loves and heartbreaks, the experimentation with sex and alcohol, the parental pressures, and the struggle to make profound decisions about the future.”
Why I’m Interested: It’s no secret that the media climate of My Super Sweet 16, Gossip Girl and the masterfully manipulative Laguna Beach is in need of a serious real-world corrective. I hope Burstein (who was nominated for an Oscar for On the Ropes, and whose last theatrical release was the cheekily worshipful Robert Evans doc The Kid Stays in the Picture) has managed it.
With 49 days to go until the opening night of the Sundance Film Festival, expect to see some space here devoted to previews of some of the films I’m particularly interested in. The first thing that really caught my eye upon skimming the schedule was Derek, a film about Derek Jarman directed by Isaac Julien. Executive produced by actress/Jarman muse Tilda Swinton and produced by film historian Colin MacCabe, the World Documentary Competition entry purports to “combine document with fiction, and experiment with narrative” to fashion “a timely reappraisal and celebration of the work of one of Britain’s most important artist filmmakers.” There’s a bit of an expanded synopsis on Julien’s web site. After Sundance, the film will be part of an exhibit devoted to Jarman curated by Julien, at the Serpentine Gallery in London.
I’m generally fan of what I know of Jarman’s work, but I’m mostly interested in this because lately I’ve been kind of a sucker for non-fiction films that take huge liberties with documentary form. In a recent interview with BOMB magazine, Julien actually spoke of Derek not as a documentary, but as “a strange kind of biopic about [Jarman's] life.” All in all, it’s classification in the doc competition seems a little strange, but it maybe another sign of Sundance 2008’s swing towards a more adventurous programming attitude. Strange Culture, another non-fiction film involving Swinton that incorporated narrative elements, premiered at Sundance last year in the marginalized Frontier sidebar, which I thought was unfortunate–it was hands down the best documentary I saw at the festival last year, but got little attention out of competition.
Jarman, who died of AIDS in 1994, is fairly well represented today on YouTube. More after the jump.
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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Two additions to the deal chart report: after days of negotiating with several companies, Nanette Burstein has finally sold American Teen to Paramount Vantage. Also, Isaac Julien’s Derek has been acquired for US distribution and worldwide sales by Andrew Hurwitz’ Film Sales Company. See the full 
