Novelist Russell Banks has been publishing books for nearly 40 years, but in terms of film he’s still something of a newcomer. In 1997, when he was well into his 50s and long suspicious of the business of movies, two of cinema’s most renowned auteurs, Paul Schrader and Atom Egoyan, involved him in the process of adapting his novels Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter, respectively. Both films were critically acclaimed, and Banks has remained active within the world of independent film ever since.

The Filmmaker Lodge was packed with people—and possibilities—as all nine filmmakers from this year’s inaugural NEXT section gathered together for the first time. With Sundance Film Festival’s newly minted Festival director, John Cooper moderating, the conversation was lively, insightful, and frequently silly.Cooper began by explaining the genesis of NEXT, citing the need to “carve out” a protected space in the Festival program for the burgeoning low- and no-budget filmmaking scene.

I was a tad perplexed when I learned that Louis C.K., one of my favorite comics no one knows about, was premiering his standup film Louis C.

Part intimate profile of two determined women, part revealing glimpse into life in Iran, and part pulse-pounding sports film, Kick In Iran follows 20-year-old Taekwondo sensation Sara Khoshjamal-Fekri and her trainer Maryam Azarmehr as they train and fight for Olympic gold. Documentarian Fatima Geza Abdollahyan shoots these two fascinating women in their homes, in gender-segregated gyms, at prayer and play, and finally to the Olympic games in Beijing. Even though Iranian women are still discouraged from high-impact athletics, Sara’s success becomes its own agent for change.

Los Angeles, CA (Park City, UT) – Sundance Institute and NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) today announced the winners of the 2010 Sundance / NHK International Filmmakers Awards. The four winners were selected from 12 finalists by members of an International Jury which included: Violeta Bava, John Carney, Michael Lehmann, Rebecca Miller, Jose Rivera, Elena Soarez, Pablo Stoll and Wesley Strick; and a Japanese Jury that included Masato Harada, Shin-ichi Kobayashi and Bong-Ou Lee.
Originally created to celebrate 100 years of Cinema, the annual award recognizes and supports four visionary filmmakers from Europe, Latin America, the United States, and Japan on their next films.

A breathless Sam Taylor-Wood almost passed out from excitement at the premiere of her film Nowhere Boy. The biopic of John Lennon’s early, tumultuous life features an uncanny performance by Aaron Johnson, who worked long hours to get Lennon’s signature accent.Taylor-Wood understood early on that the pic would be in the firing line of Lennon worshipers, so research was crucial.

Four Lions, the hotly anticipated debut film by British satirist Chris Morris, courts controversy and laughter in equal measure. But what’s most shocking about this madcap comedy about a group of hapless wannabe suicide bombers is how warm-hearted it is. Pitched somewhere between the Three Stooges and The Office, Four Lions follows four British-born jihadists as they bumble and scheme their way to a potentially violent, and inevitably foolish, end.

It would be cliché to list all the films that have been transformed by their scores. You know the ones I mean: Jaws, Indiana Jones, Flash Gordon. BMI’s Sundance Film Festival roundtable discussion “Music and Film: The Creative Process” recognized the importance of a score to the film, and ingeniously brought together not just random composers and directors, but the composer-director pairs who had worked on many of this year’s Festival films.

Even if you attended all 10 days of the 2010 Festival, 186 movies (even if 73 of them are shorts) is a lot of movies, and that doesn’t include everything else the Festival and Park City offer: the panels, the trippy, immersive New Frontier on Main installations, the parties, and the snow begging you to frolic in it. There’s a way to not let the Festival’s wealth of culture overwhelm you, though: it’s entirely possible to make your own mini festival from the Festival at large. In a film festival that surrounds you with many ways to experience what’s going on in the world beyond just attending movie screenings, it’s easy to pick a topic and follow its thread throughout the Festival.

This week Sundance Film Festival audiences have been taken to other countries, other worlds, and other realities via the power of film, but this afternoon Anna Deavere Smith transported a crowd at the Egyptian Theatre through the bare essentials of theatre – voice, expression, and deep conviction.
As part of the festival’s Offscreen discussion series, Smith sat down with Michele Norris of NPR’s All Things Considered to talk about her career and craft. She also performed sections of her current one-woman play about health care, Let Me Down Easy, which was created, as with all of her plays, from a painstaking process of research and immersive impersonation.

“Every film in this Festival has to have been a nightmare to get made, and this is no exception,” director Jake Scott said on Saturday after the premiere of his second feature, Welcome to the Rileys. “Though I think ours may have been a bit easier than everybody else’s now that I’ve talked to some people.” Son of Ridley, nephew of Tony, Jake Scott leveraged his familiar capital (dad and uncle serve as executive producers) to make a film of surprising and impressive restraint.

As two films in the Festival diabolically illustrate, claustrophobia has more than one instigator. Both Rodrigo Cortés’s Buried and Adam Green’s Frozen prey on the primal fear of confinement, and each film follows through on the blunt threat of their titles. In Buried, a man (Ryan Reynolds) awakens to find himself buried alive, with only a cell phone and Zippo lighter to battle darkness, panic, and death.

When Hollywood makes movies about the war in Iraq, location shooting often takes place in Jordan or the deserts of the American Southwest, which provide a safe, if not always convincing, substitute for the real thing. But when Iraqi filmmaker Mohamed Al-Daradji‏ embarked on his latest feature film Son of Babylon, he decided that only authentic locations would suffice. The movie, which is playing in the Festival’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition lineup, was filmed over 65 days in seven different cities in Iraq – including war-torn Baghdad and Basra.

Director Derek Cianfrance juxtaposes the realistic highs and lows of romance in his moving film, Blue Valentine. The audience first meets Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) just as their marriage begins to unravel. Dean whisks them off to a themed hotel with hopes of reviving the relationship, and just before they arrive, the audience is transported back in time, to witness how the couple first fell in love.