2006 Sundance Film Festival Film Lineup
by Andre Soares
The film lineup for the 2006 edition of the Sundance Film Festival has been announced. Among the 16 films up for the Best (American) Documentary Award are Ian Inaba’s American Blackout, which follows the career of Representative Cynthia McKinney (a Democrat from Georgia) and the suppression of the black vote throughout U.S. history; Joseph Mathew’s Crossing Arizona, about the people involved in and/or affected by illegal immigration in the American Southwest; and James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments, a three-segment depiction of today’s war-torn Iraq.
Among the 16 films selected for the American dramatic competition are Paul Fitzgerald’s Forgiven, the tale of a former D.A. - now running for the U.S. Congress - who discovers that the state governor has pardoned a death-row inmate whom he had prosecuted in the past; So Yong Kim’s In Between Days, which portrays the difficulties faced by a Korean immigrant while trying to adjust to both a new love and a new life in the U.S.; and Maria Maggenti’s screwball comedy Puccini for Beginners, about a woman who finds herself having two convoluted love affairs.
Included in the 16 films running for the World Cinema Documentary Award are Angry Monk - Reflections on Tibet (Switzerland), Luc Schaedler’s take on the rebellious Tibetan monk Gendun Choephel; Christian Frei’s Giant Buddhas (Switzerland), a discussion on religious fanaticism, intolerance, and faith, taking as a starting point the Taliban’s destruction of the ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan; and Philip Gröning’s Die Große Stille / Into Great Silence (Germany), which examines life inside the Grande Chartreuse, the chief abode of the legendary Carthusian Order.
And finally, included in the 16 films vying for the World Cinema Dramatic Award are Christoffer Boe’s Allegro (Denmark), the story of an amnesiac pianist (Ulrich Thomsen) who delves into his past after meeting a mysterious stranger; Jasmila Zbanic’s Grbavica (Bosnia-Herzegovina), the story of a mother and daughter (Mirjana Karanovic and Luna Mijovic) who struggle to survive during the aftermath of the recent war in the Balkans; and Andrucha Waddington’s Casa de Areia / House of Sand, about a woman who spends decades living in a remote sand dune in Brazil. The woman is played by real-life mother and daughter Fernanda Montenegro — of Central do Brasil / Central Station — and Fernanda Torres
Press release: Sundance Film Festival 2006 Lineup
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