One day before the start of the Sundance Film Festival, a program of the Sundance Institute, and its gathering of independent filmmakers from around the world, the Ford Foundation announced a five-year, $50 million initiative to help find and support a new generation of filmmakers whose works address urgent social issues.
The Sundance Film Festival hasn’t even started yet and another documentary film has reportedly been acquired. Reelmovienews is reporting that the documentary The Greatest Movie Ever Sold which is set to premiere Saturday at the festival has been acquired by Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions for distribution in U.S. and Canada.
Just days before its premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in the World Cinema documentary competition, HBO announced that it has picked up all domestic rights to the documentary Project Nim. Project Nim is directed by James Marsh and produced by Simon Chinn, the team behind the Oscar winning documentary Man on Wire.
Film Independent, the non-profit arts organization that produces the Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival, announced the winners of its four filmmaker grant awards at the Spirit Awards Filmmaker Grant and Nominee Brunch held at BOA Steakhouse in West Hollywood. Sandra Oh and Terrence Howard hosted the casual event and handed out the honors.
IFC Films has grabbed the U.S. rights to director Rowan Joffe’s debut feature Brighton Rock. Joffe, whose previous writing credits include 28 Weeks Later and The American, adapted the script from Graham Greene’s 1939 iconic crime novel of the same name. Produced by Paul Webster (Atonement, Eastern Promises) and co-produced by Paul Ritchie (Nowhere Boy, Slumdog Millionaire), the film stars Sam Riley (Control), Andrea Riseborough (Never Let Me Go), John Hurt (Immortals), and Helen Mirren (The Last Station) and will be released by IFC Films in the summer of 2011.
Cinema Guild announced that they will release Putty Hill, a film by Matt Porterfield. An official selection of the Berlin International Film Festival and SXSW, among many others, and nominated for the Cinema Eye Heterodox Award (a new award category created to honor a narrative film that imaginatively incorporates nonfiction strategies), Putty Hill will open in New York at Cinema Village on February 18. A national release will follow.
In national voting completed on Friday, members of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and Screen Actors Guild voted overwhelmingly to approve a new, three-year contract covering theatrical and television production under the Producer-Screen Actors Guild Basic Agreement and Television Agreement, Exhibit A to the AFTRA Network Television Code and the CW Supplement, which applies to both unions.
AFTRA, SAG and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers reached a tentative agreement in November on the deal that provides increases in base rates, contributions to the unions’ benefits plans, expanded employment opportunities and other improvements for working performers.
The USA Network made its first ever independent film acquisition by snagging ‘The Space Between’, a drama starring Melissa Leo. Written and directed by Travis Fine, the movie premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival.
The Librarian of Congress named 25 motion pictures—Hollywood classics, documentaries and innovative shorts reflecting genres from every era of American filmmaking—to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.
Massachusetts-based independent film production and marketing firm Pyrate Motion Picture Company, LLC (aka Pyrate Films) has announced plans to develop an epic feature film about the British West Indies island of Anguilla and its sensational, but little known 1967 to 1969 battle for economic, social, and political justice.
Pyrate Films was launched in 2010 following a series of meetings in Anguilla with government ministers, including the Hon. Chief Minister Hubert Hughes, and several living patriots, including Anguilla’s rebel leader and founding father, the Hon. James Ronald Webster, now 85.
Eric Escobar has been selected to receive this year’s San Francisco Film Society/Hearst Screenwriting Grant for the continuing development of his script East County. The Hearst Screenwriting Grant of $15,000 is given to a mid-career American screenwriter whose project expresses both a unique personal perspective and an artistic approach to the subject. The grant is open to those who have been practicing writers for at least five years and who have previously written a minimum of one feature screenplay. Priority is given to writers whose previous short or feature screenplays have been produced as an independent film.
