The competition films at Sundance have been announced (with more films to be revealed over the next few days and the shorts will be revealed next week). The number of international competition features and documentaries has been expanded to equal the US films. In an interview with IndieWire, Sundance director of programming John Cooper points out that 32 of the films are directed by women (at a time when the number of studio films directed by women is decreasing).

There are a number of interesting films.

Three documentaries deal with Iraq. Patricia Foulkrod's The Ground Truth: After The Killing Ends (the trailer and several clips are online and James Longley's Iraq in Fragments are in the US competition. And in the World Cinema competition, Heidi Specogna's The Short Life of Jose Antonio Gutierrez, about one of the first Marines to be killed in Iraq.

An MP3 from June of a brief speech Longley gave followed by a Q&A about his experience in Iraq is online. He also made the excellent Gaza Strip which is available on DVD.

Ian Inaba, of GNN, directed Eminem's Mosh video (an interview regarding the video is available). His doc at Sundance, American Blackout, is described as "a stylish hard hitting documentary that recounts the fascinating career of Representative Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) and the suppression of the black vote historically and during the recent Presidential elections in Florida and Ohio."

Henriette Mantel played Alice in the Brady Bunch movies. She also worked for Ralph Nader (and as a union organizer and writer on Michael Moore's The Awful Truth) and she and Stephen Skrovan profile Nader in their doc An Unreasonable Man.

A Lion In The House is a nearly four hour look at the lives of five children with cancer by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert. It will air on PBS as part of Independent Lens next June 21st and 22nd. A doctor contacted the filmmakers after seeing Hoop Dreams (which also was shown at Sundance). Gravel, a short doc made by Bogner and Reichert during a break in the production of Lion is online.

Malcolm Ingram wrote for Film Threat and had a couple of low budget films produced by Kevin Smith. His doc is Small Town Gay Bar.

Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan's Troublesome Creek was nominated for an Oscar and aired on PBS. So Much So Fast is about Stephen Heywood who develops ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) and his brother Jamie who started the ALS Therapy Development Foundation. They were also the subject of an article in the New Yorker by Jonathan Weiner because of the book His Brother's Keeper.

Lauren Greenfield has produced remarkable photography books including Girl Culture. Her documentary for HBO, Thin, is about eating disorders.

Wordplay, by Patrick Creadon, is about Will Shortz who creates puzzles for NPR and a certain major paper.
ed: JH