Sundance 2011: Five Films Will Premiere Simultaneously at the Fest and On Demand
Debi Moore
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Can’t make it to Utah this year for the 2011 Sundance Film Festival? Well, thanks to Sundance Selects, the theatrical and video-on-demand film label, five films being screened at the fest will simultaneously be available nationwide, on demand, on most major cable systems. Two seems to qualify as genre films, but the others sound worthy of a bit of attention as well.
From the Press Release:
Sundance Selects has announced its second partnership with the not-for-profit Sundance Institute for the 2011 Sundance Film Festival (January 20th-30th; Park City, UT). Five films are part of the “Direct from the Sundance Film Festival” initiative, including four world premieres recently acquired by Sundance Selects (Brendan Fletcher’s MAD BASTARDS, Michael Tully’s SEPTIEN, Paul Mariano and Kurt Norton’s THESE AMAZING SHADOWS, and Joe Swanberg’s UNCLE KENT) and one U.S. premiere (Gregg Araki’s KABOOM). The films featured through the Sundance Institute and Sundance Selects partnership will begin screening on video-on-demand at the same time as their premieres at the Sundance Film Festival and will be available in approximately 40 million homes on major cable systems including Bright House, Comcast, Cablevision, Cox, and Time Warner Cable.
President of Sundance Selects Jonathan Sehring said, “Working with the Sundance Film Festival and Sundance Institute has been an exceptional collaboration for us. We love being able to, once again, take some of the remarkable films that Sundance Film Festival has to offer this year directly to the homes of millions of film lovers who won’t be able to make the trek to Sundance.”
John Cooper, Director, Sundance Film Festival said, “As part of the Sundance family, we have always been excited about discovering innovative ways to help our filmmakers find their audience.”
Kaboom and Septien are the aforementioned genre flicks, and here are their synopses:
KABOOM: Sundance veteran Gregg Araki returns to the festival with KABOOM, a hyper-stylized Twin Peaks for the Coachella Generation, featuring a gorgeous, super hot young cast. The film is a wild, sex-drenched, comical thriller that tells the story of Smith, an ambisexual 18-year-old college freshman who stumbles upon a monstrous conspiracy in a seemingly idyllic Southern California seaside town. Written and directed by Araki (who has shown eight films at Sundance from his breakthrough The Living End to The Doom Generation to his masterpiece Mysterious Skin) and produced by Araki and his longtime producer Andrea Sperling, the film stars Thomas Dekker, Juno Temple, Haley Bennett, Chris Zylka, Roxane Mesquida, Andy Fischer-Price, James Duval, and Kelly Lynch. The film made its world premiere in the Main Selection at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival and had its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2010. KABOOM will make its U.S. premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and simultaneously on-demand on January 21, followed by a platformed national theatrical run beginning January 28th at the IFC Center in New York City and February 4th at Landmark’s NuArt Theater in Los Angeles, with additional markets and theaters to follow. The film will be shown in the Spotlight section.
SEPTIEN: Writer/director Michael Tully’s film follows Cornelius Rawlings (Michael Tully), who returns to his family’s farm eighteen years after disappearing without a trace. While his parents are long deceased, Cornelius’s brothers continue to live in isolation on this forgotten piece of land. Ezra (Robert Longstreet) is a freak for two things: cleanliness and Jesus. Amos (Onur Tukel) is a self-taught artist who fetishizes sports and Satan. Although back home, Cornelius is still distant. In between challenging strangers to one-on-one games, he huffs and drinks the days away. The family’s high-school sports demons show up one day in the guise of a plumber and a pretty girl. Only a mysterious drifter can redeem their souls on 4th and goal. Triple-threat actor/writer/director Tully creates a backwoods world that’s only a few trees away from our own, complete with characters on the edge of sanity that we can actually relate to. A hero tale gone wrong, SEPTIEN is funny when it’s inappropriate to laugh and realistic when it should be psychotic. The film will make its world premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and simultaneously on-demand on January 23. It will have select national theatrical dates in 2011 and will be shown in the Park City at Midnight section.
The other three films are Brendan Fletcher’s MAD BASTARDS, a raw look at the journey to becoming a man and the personal transformation one must make (January 24); Paul Mariano and Kurt Norton’s THESE AMAZING SHADOWS, a documentary that molds a cultural history from pieces of film, offering a microcosm of the work of the National Film Registry and making a powerful case for film preservation (January 22), and Joe Swanberg’s UNCLE KENT (January 21), an achingly true-to-life modern comedy about aging, loneliness, desire, and the awkward intimacies of online friendship. For more about them and all the other entries at this year’s festival, visit the official 2011 Sundance Film Festival website.
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