January is a busy time to be in the movie business. It’s the middle of the Awards season (did anyone predict Argo’s success at the Golden Globes last week?) and marks the beginning of a whole new year of Film Festivals and all the promise and expectation this brings.
The first festival of the season is the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, which began last week and finishes on Monday. It’s the largest independent film festival in the US and showcases new work from American and international filmmakers. The festival has grown hugely since it began in 1978, when it was called the Utah/US Film Festival, and now there are a total of twelve sections in which films can be presented.
One of those is the World Cinema Dramatic Competition Program, and this year one of the 12 films selected to compete is Shopping, the debut feature film from the New Zealand writing/directing team of Mark Albiston and Louis Sutherland.
Albiston and Sutherland are familiar with the festival circuit. Their short films Run and Six Dollar Fifty Man where both honoured by the Cannes Short Film Jury with a Special Distinction, in 2007 and 2009 in the short film competition. Six Dollar Fifty Man also received the Jury Prize for International Short Filmmaking at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.
Shopping was shot last year on the Kapiti Coast and in Wellington and is set in 1981, telling the story of Samoan teenager Willy who must decide where his loyalty lies, with a family of shoplifters or with his own dysfunctional family.
Shopping will also have its European premiere at the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival, also called the Berlinale, which runs on 7-17 February; screening in the competitive Generation 14plus programme.
In fact, there will be plenty of New Zealander’s in Berlin.
Writer/director Daniel Joseph Borgman’s debut feature film The Weight of Elephants is screening in the Generation programme, which is thematically linked to the experiences of children and young people. A co-production between Denmark and New Zealand, it will also premiere and compete in the Forum Programme.
Other entries include I’m Going to Mum’s, written and directed by Lauren Jackson, which will compete in the Short Films Generation Kplus section, and a handful of New Zealand feature and short films that have been selected to screen in a new programme launched this year called NATIVe – A Journey into Indigenous Cinema.
Talking of Sundance and independent film, if you enjoy reading about entertainment industry sagas, have a read of Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film. It’s both highly entertaining and insightful.