The most talked about film at Slamdance this year was Kurt Kuenne’s Dear Zachary, a devastating account of the filmmakers’ admiration and grief for his murdered friend Andrew Bagby, who was almost certainly murdered by his girlfriend Dr. Shirley Turner, who later fled to Newfoundland before she could be brought to trial and remains in custody of their child, born months after Andrew was slain. In a Sunday Los Angeles Times article Kuenne, formerly a Filmmaker Magazine “25 New Face in Independent Film” and currently doing the festival rounds with his short Slow, expressed his hopes that the film, which opens in New York this Friday, can influence Canadians (who recently elected a new parliament) to change their extradition laws in hopes of catching Turner.

We caught up with Kuenne to discuss more trivial matters: his great affection for Wall-E, feeling over analysis as a guide to filmmaking and finding inspiration in children’s books.

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It’ll be a bit strange at Slamdance this year without one of its most familiar faces. For eight years Sarah Diamond was a fixture at the little festival at the treasure Mountain Inn, the the upstart answer to Sundance’s Geoff Gilmore, only without the girth and goatee. She recently stepped away from Slamdance to pursue a career in law; she’ll be at Harvard this fall. Now with her media consumption opened up to things beyond Slamdance submissions, we caught up with her to talk about Flannery O’Connor, Project Runway and why Werner Herzog should let the Bad Lieutenant remake slide and make a movie about the Smiths instead.

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Veteran documentarian Ken Burns is on the Board of Governors for the Telluride Film Festival. The creator of classic PBS documentary mini-series like The War, Baseball, and Jazz, all of which have a total runtime of many hundreds of minutes, it’s a wonder this guy watches anything other than the archival material he uses to assemble his films. He mentions a film called Hunger by Steve McQueen that’s playing here. No, it’s not the ghost of the Steve McQueen you might be thinking of, this Steve McQueen is a Turner Prize winning British video artist turned filmmaker. A full review of Hunger with an interview is coming soon.

Ken Burns talks Mad Men and David Fincher after the jump.

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Jeff Goldblum is at Telluride to promote his new film, Adam Resurrected, directed by Paul Schrader. The film follows the story of a Holocaust survivor who also happens to be a clown. Committed to an asylum after the war, he becomes a ring leader of sorts. On the opening day of the festival Goldblum was graciously hugging young fans and striking odd poses for snap-shots. We got a chance to ask him about his media intake, which includes a substantial amount homework from Schrader.

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2008 has proven to be a year of many ironies for filmmaker Benh Zeitlin, some sweet, others sour. His film, the visionary SXSW shorts winner Glory at Sea, is a sprawling post-Katrina, post-Apocalyptic New Orleans epic about a roving band of vagabonds and their child companions, all searching for their things or people they’ve lost within the watery gulf. The film bowed just days after Zeitlin was nearly killed in a horrible car accident while on his way to Austin for its premiere. While recovering, a small cult has built around the film and Zeitlin’s profile has only continued to gain steam, culminating last month when he was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces in Independent Film. He’s a true blue cinephile, with taste that ranges from the esoteric to the height of 80’s Hollywood trash (we’ll forgive him for not digging Antonioni’s masterful The Passenger).

We caught up with Benh to discuss the inability of contemporary movies to depict dynamic female characters, his obsession with filmmaking on boats and why Van Morrison is his dream collaborator.

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In her blipster comedy I’m Through With White Girls, which cleaned up on the black film fest circuit last year before finally landing in NYC at a contentious BAM screening earlier this month, Jennifer Sharpe wears her black nerd credentials on her sleeve while maintaining a sure hand of a relatively conventional romantic comedy. Anthony Montgomery starts as a comic book-drawing, cigarette holder-using, fedora-sporting prolonged adolescent case who serial dates Caucasian woman and, after tying his relationship troubles to his ex’s lack of pigmentation instead of his own fear of commitment, takes up with a neurotic, light skinned black novelist (one who seems to be a charter member of the George Clinton hair club for women).

On the eve of her film’s DVD release, we caught up with Sharpe, a current IFP Market laureate for her script Native Honkeys (clearly she’s outdoing herself), about watching earnest dramas, whyThe Poisonwood Bible should be made into a movie and just how long someone can listen to The Roots for. …Read more

This week on The Media Diet, we check in with Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis. Grant is the brain behind Filmbrain; Hillis is a freelance critic and reporter whose work can be found at Premiere, The Village Voice and his personal blog, Cinephiliac. Together, they’ve just launched Benten Films, a boutique DVD distribution company aimed at drawing attention to “overlooked gems that deserve greater recognition.” Benten’s first release, Joe Swanberg’s LOL, will hit stores on August 28 (more on that closer to the date). They’re also planning to release two films by Aaron Katz, Dance Party USA and Quiet City, sometime after both screen at The New Talkies festival in New York, which begins next week.

SPOUT: We start each installment of The Media Diet with the old desert island question: you’re packing your suitcase for life-long seclusion on a tropical island that happens to have a full entertainment system. What records, books, movies, video games, websites, etc do you bring with?
AARON: I’m a media whore, so this stream of consciousness might change in an hour: I’m watching Playtime, Once Upon a Time in the West, 2001, Wings of Desire, Suspiria, Penn & Teller Get Killed, and the collected works of Herzog, Buñuel, Altman, Godard, and the Marx Brothers. I’m listening to Bob Dylan, Radiohead, Zappa, James Kochalka Superstar, and the four actresses covering Blue Hearts songs in Linda Linda Linda. Also, if my island has internet and video games, who needs books? (Kidding!)
ANDREW: I’ll try to keep this sensible, i.e., what I could reasonably carry in my backpack. The only book I’d need (the only book anybody needs for that matter) is William Gaddis’ The Recognitions, for it says everything there is to say about the human condition. I’d like to have every note recorded by John Coltrane, some Nick Drake, Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem, and that Scarlett Johansson album of Tom Waits covers. (No, I haven’t heard it, but, come on…) Films, of course, are tough—give me complete box sets of Godard, Allen, Cassavetes and Imamura. Throw in The Big Lebowski, Lawrence of Arabia, and Xanadu and I’m set.

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Welcome to The Media Diet, a new feature on SpoutBlog where we ask indie film movers and shakers a bunch of stupid questions about movies, videos, tabloid scandals, celebrity diet secrets, and other cultural detritus.

Up first is David Wain. Wain first skyrocketed to hipster notoriety in the early-90s as a member of The State. He went on to direct the genius Meatballs parody/tribute Wet Hot American Summer, which Wain co-wrote with fellow State alum Michael Showalter. Now Wain has cast a passel of former State-ees in his second directorial effort, The Ten, which opens this Friday. The film, a sketch-driven re-telling of The Ten Commandments, also stars Paul Rudd, Winona Ryder and Liev Schreiber. Click through the jump for Wain’s thoughts on desert island must-haves, comedy based on advertising, and Charlton Heston’s finest hour.

David Wain photo courtesy of Yougna Park.

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