The stars — including Oscar winners Alan Arkin, Juliette Binoche, Jennifer Connelly, Al Pacino, Kevin Spacey and Marisa Tomei — will be out in Park City in January, appearing in films in the Premieres section of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.
Festival organizers announced the noncompetitive portion of the event’s schedule on Thursday, listing 57 titles that include bigger-budget star vehicles, avant-garde experimental films, bloody slasher films and acclaimed titles that have played at Cannes, Venice and Toronto.
Some stars are pulling double duty, appearing in two films: John C. Reilly, Greg Kinnear, Elizabeth Banks, Ray Liotta and Rutger Hauer. Other stars to watch for include Tobey Maguire, Sigourney Weaver, Laura Linney, Rob Lowe, Paul Rudd, Zooey Deschanel, Stanley Tucci and Paul Giamatti.
For the first time, Sundance is starting a program dedicated to documentary filmmakers.
The new Documentary Premieres program features eight films by filmmakers who have made their names at previous Sundance festivals.
“It’s time to celebrate filmmakers who are part of the whole documentary film culture,” said festival director John Cooper.
Before this new offering, Cooper said the only venue for these filmmakers was the U.S. Documentary competition, and the veteran filmmakers were crowding out newcomers.
“This gives the documentary competition more new faces,” he said.
The Documentary Premieres includes veterans such as Steve James (“Hoop Dreams”), Liz Garbus (“The Execution of Wanda Jean”) and Morgan Spurlock (“Super Size Me”). It also includes what could be a controversial title: “Reagan,” a profile of the 40th president by Eugene Jarecki, whose examination of modern war policy, “Why We Fight,” won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2005.
A Premieres title that excites Cooper is “Life in a Day,” which he put on the Sundance slate last summer before footage was shot. “I said ‘Let’s do this. Let’s try this experiment,’ ” Cooper said of the film, a compilation of footageshot around the world by amateur filmmakers — all capturing life in a single day, July 24, 2010.
The footage was submitted via YouTube and is being assembled and edited by British director Kevin Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland”). Twenty of the amateur filmmakers will be flown in for the premiere in Park City, and the post-screening Q-and-A session will be streamed online.
Cooper has seen some of the film and called it “kind of amazing.”
Another Premieres title could expose the Hollywood market mentality of Sundance. It’s “Red State,” a horror-thriller directed and written by Kevin Smith, whose first movie, “Clerks,” debuted at Sundance in 1995 — and whose last movie, the buddy-action comedy “Cop Out,” bombed commercially this year.
In an e-mail message sent Sunday to the movie blog SlashFilm, Smith declared a unique — and possibly tongue-in-cheek — strategy for finding a distributor. “My plan is to pick the ‘Red State’ distributor right there — IN THE ROOM — auction style,” Smith wrote. “Might even bring up a professional auctioneer to make it fun and unintelligible.”
The fun and frenzy of the Sundance Film Festival runs Jan. 20-30 in Park City and at venues in Salt Lake City, Ogden and the Sundance resort in Provo Canyon.
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