2005 Sundance Winners

Darren Burrows in Forty Shades of Blue. Photo courtesy of FSOB LLC.

Forty Shades of Blue, a love triangle involving a country singer (Rip Torn), the Russian immigrant with whom he lives (Dina Korzun), and the singer’s estranged son (Darren Burrows) won the best American fiction film award at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. Ira Sachs directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Michael Rohatyn.
The best American documentary award went to Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight, which explores decades of American war-making through a social, political, economic, and ideological prism. (The director’s brother, Andrew Jarecki, won the same award in 2003 for Capturing the Friedmans.)
The World Dramatic Grand Jury Prize went to Zezé Gamboa’s O Herói / The Hero, the story [...]

Toronto Film Festival 2004: African Cinema

Besides the usual Planet Africa program, which presents five features and eight shorts, the 2004 Toronto Film Festival is offering a look at South African cinema. The five features presented in the sidebar South Africa: Ten Years Later are Red Dust, the Zulu-language Yesterday (directed by Darrell Roodt), Drum, Cape of Good Hope, and Forgiveness.
Film topics range from the bleak (AIDS in Yesterday) and the political (the fight against Apartheid in Drum) to the uplifting (the bond created among humans through their love of animals in Cape of Good Hope).
Other African films to be presented at the festival include Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene’s La Noire de … (Black Girl), which was first released in 1966 and is widely [...]