Notizie

Here’s your daily dose of an indie film, web series, TV pilot, what-have-you in progress — at the end of the week, you’ll have the chance to vote for your favorite.

In the meantime: Is this a project you’d want to see? Tell us in the comments.

The Atom: A Love Affair

Logline: A feature documentary revealing the tragicomic true story of our relationship with that most controversial energy source, nuclear power – as told by those who were there. After 7 turbulent decades, is the atomic love affair coming to an end?

Elevator Pitch:

Nuclear power is one of those divisive, “hot button” topics people can never agree about. But how did we get here? “The Atom: A Love Affair” reveals an oft-forgotten history through frank testimony from major players on both sides of the Atlantic – including politicians, scientists, engineers and campaigners. Their dramatic recollections are brought to...

In the age of the internet, marketing a documentary is all about targeting influencial bloggers and cultivating online communities

Most films find an audience through a few well-chosen ads in newspapers and a handful of reviews. Not Bill Cunningham New York, Richard Press's Oscar-nominated documentary about the 84-year-old New York Times fashion photographer. UK distributor Dogwoof made a conscious decision to target fashion bloggers, creating buzz about the film. About 50 of these so-called fashion "influencers" blogged about the film, creating what Dogwoof's chief executive, Andy Whittaker, calls "the perfect social storm". Welcome to marketing documentaries in the age of the internet.

"One of the key tricks is identifying influencers and tapping into them and co-ordinating that into the campaign," says Whittaker. "The first people we wanted to reach were those who understood the importance of Bill Cunningham."

Whittaker, who founded the independent distribution label eight years ago, used to be an executive at eBay,...

A new documentary looks into the global financial meltdown, and also proves to be a good companion piece to Inside Job...

Any mention of the global financial crisis is almost certain to trigger something of an agnostic reaction in most people. We're aware of its existence, aware that something happened involving things called subprime mortgages, aware that a lot of people lost a lot of money and that our tax pounds flooded to the aid of the very institutions that were to blame for the whole sorry affair.

This said, unless you or someone close to you was unfortunate enough to be caught in the fallout, for most people, it still seems to be something abstract that happened to other people somewhere far away, be that in either geographic or socioeconomic terms. The ‘worst economic disaster since The Great Depression' came and went as we were all busy moaning about...

X-Men: First Class (12A)

(Matthew Vaughn, 2011, Us) James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Bacon, Rose Byrne, January Jones. 132 mins

Considering the odds were stacked against this – preceding as it does four X-Men movies (including Hugh Jackman's Wolverine), entering a superhero-stuffed summer schedule, juggling scores of characters, and telling a story fans know already – this does a remarkably good job. The cold war setting offers a new take on closeted mutanthood, and a parallel version of the Cuban missile crisis, not to mention Bond-like stylings, and McAvoy and Fassbender add dramatic ballast to some overbearing special effects.

Senna (12A)

(Asif Kapadia, 2010, UK) 106 mins

A Formula One doc that doesn't follow the formula, this assembles a compelling, even moving, biography of the superstar Brazilian driver using only archive material and audio interviews; no talking heads or modern-day footage. The racetrack excitement is contagious.

Last Night (12A)

(Massy Tadjedin, 2010, Us/Fra) Sam Worthington,...

Documentary film–maker David Sington explains why chargers are the bane of his life

What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?

I suppose if we're talking technology and not product then it's the light-sensitive chip, which is the key thing that allows digital photography and film-making. It's the key thing that's brought the documentary back to the big screen. It's provided an affordable route to producing pictures of a high-enough definition for cinemas.

When was the last time you used it, and what for?

It was actually doing the DVD extras for my film The Flaw – which, oddly enough, was an interview with me.

What additional features would you add if you could?

I think that what's really needed is for the technology to settle down to a universal format, or codec. The systems are very proprietary so getting the pictures off the camera...

Films such as Inside Job and Super Size Me are compelling but preach to the converted. What happens when the lights go up?

As the credits roll on The Flaw, a new documentary on the financial crisis, and we learn the fates of the various interviewees, it's Andrew Luan, a former mortgage bond trader for Deutsche Bank, who has emerged from the meltdown best. Now a guide who provides walking tours (and handy narrative threads for documentary filmmakers) through post-credit crunch Wall Street, his business has been on the up since 2008. The Flaw – from In the Shadow of the Moon director David Sington – joins Inside Job and Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story in cinema's growing oeuvre of rueful postmortems on the global financial system. But watching them, I sometimes wonder if their function is just like Luan's Wall Street walkabout: vicariously entertaining us with the spectacle of our own decline.

In the informative The Flaw David Sington takes us through the origins of the 2008 banking fiasco, but the documentary isn't utterly clear on what it understands capitalism's "flaw" to be

British film-maker David Sington has made a pretty good documentary about the banking catastrophe in The Flaw, though it is not nearly as good as Charles Ferguson's Oscar-winning Inside Job: it has less journalistic bite and is more lenient with the white-collar players involved. Sington takes us through the origins of the 2008 fiasco and how the problem was the boom in house mortgages and bank securities based on those mortgages. He does a good job of emphasising that much of this activity was based on refinancing ie borrowing more and more money on an existing mortgaged property, often to cover other debts. So it was not extending the dream of home ownership. The film's title comes from Federal...

With the 2011 Sundance Film Festival entering its second and final weekend, we have a few bits of new to bring you out of Park City, Utah.  First up, Mike Cahill's sci-fi film Another Earth has been awarded the festival's Alfred P. Sloan Award for its status as an "outstanding feature film focusing on science or technology as a theme, or depicting a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character."  The award carries with it a $20,000 cash award for Cahill and Co.  Briefly, Another Earth stars William Mapother and Brit Marling and centers on two strangers who strike up an unlikely love affair against the backdrop of the discovery of a duplicate Earth. Next up are a couple of Sundance acquisitions and we begin with the annoucement that Focus Features has snatched up the rights to Dee Rees' Pariah.  Starring Adepero Oduye, Pernell Walker, and Kim Wayans, the...

New Video has acquired rights to Sundance doc "The Flaw," directed by British filmmaker David Sington ("In The Shadow of the Moon"). It will be released under New Video's Docurama Films brand later this year. Full release below: New Video Acquires David Sington'S 2011 Sundance Entry, "The Flaw," For Multi-platform Release New York, NY - January 27, 2011 - New Video, a leading independent film and TV distributor, announced today ...

Exclusive: New Video has made the latest Sundance film deal, acquiring the David Sington-directed financial crisis documentary The Flaw. New Video plans a limited theatrical run and then release on DVD, VOD and digital platforms. Sington's documentary tackles the financial meltdown, and gets its title from U.S. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's acknowledgment that he'd discovered a flaw in his model of how the world worked. Sington, the British filmmaker who previously made In the Shadow of the Moon, breaks down in detail the reasons behind the 2008 crisis, from credit default swaps to greed and avarice. The film was produced by Christopher Hird (The End of the Line), Luke Johnson and Stephen Lambert of Studio Lambert. The film debuted last Friday. "The Flaw delves into one of society's most pressing concerns with precision and intelligence," New Video acquisitions president Mark Kashden said. "We wanted to be sure David's...

For those in the documentary world, selection by Sundance represents a peak of achievement. Here the limelight falls as equally upon the non-fiction set as it does on their hipper dramatic cousins, especially because it’s often easier to wait-list a documentary ticket. After a late-night traipsing from The Details’s after party at the Bing Bar to Gun Hill Road’s intimate fête at Park City’s Asian-fusion restaurant Shabu, I caught a morning viewing of documentaries to counter excessive ski-slope frivolity: Eugene Jarecki’s profile of the iconic 40th president in Reagan, and David Sington’s examination of the financial crisis, The Flaw. Both filmmakers are familiar Sundance faces (Jarecki for Why We Fight and Sington for In the Shadow of the Moon), and watching their two docs together proved a thought-provoking pairing.

[Premiere Screening: Friday, Jan. 21, 9:45 pm -- Broadway Centre Cinemas V, Salt Lake City]

If I am completely honest, I would say that the biggest surprise was getting into competition at Sundance! I took on The Flaw because it seemed like a really difficult project to pull off. The brief was to make a film about the fundamental underlying cause of the present economic crisis. The first problem was therefore to identify what that was, to get beyond the stories of Wall Street shenanigans (which were obviously a big part of what went wrong, but equally clearly not the whole story, since greed and stupidity are not 21st-century inventions) to the deeper forces (mis)shaping American capitalism.

In fact, I was not too worried about the content because I have discovered from experience that the process of making a documentary film — the months of research and thought, the privileged access (in this case to everyone from distressed homeowners to Wall Street insiders to the...

"The Flaw" makes one thing clear from the outset - there was nothing simple about the U.S. financial collapse of 2007. Within minutes, experts had identified plenty of culprits: market failure, a credit culture, a wage crisis, a debt crisis, and upward redistribution of income. That's economic shorthand for fasten your seatbelt. David Sington's rigorously constructed analysis of the meltdown, told entirely by economists, brokers, bankers, and borrowers, plays like ...

"The Flaw" makes one thing clear from the outset - there was nothing simple about the U.S. financial collapse of 2007. Within minutes, experts had identified plenty of culprits: market failure, a credit culture, a wage crisis, a debt crisis, and upward redistribution of income. That's economic shorthand for fasten your seatbelt. David Sington's rigorously constructed analysis of the meltdown, told entirely by economists, brokers, bankers, and borrowers, plays like ...

"The Flaw" makes one thing clear from the outset - there was nothing simple about the U.S. financial collapse of 2007. Within minutes, experts had identified plenty of culprits: market failure, a credit culture, a wage crisis, a debt crisis, and upward redistribution of income. That's economic shorthand for fasten your seatbelt. David Sington's rigorously constructed analysis of the meltdown, told entirely by economists, brokers, bankers, and borrowers, plays like ...

"The Flaw" makes one thing clear from the outset - there was nothing simple about the U.S. financial collapse of 2007. Within minutes, experts had identified plenty of culprits: market failure, a credit culture, a wage crisis, a debt crisis, and upward redistribution of income. That's economic shorthand for fasten your seatbelt. David Sington's rigorously constructed analysis of the meltdown, told entirely by economists, brokers, bankers, and borrowers, plays like ...

"The Flaw" makes one thing clear from the outset - there was nothing simple about the U.S. financial collapse of 2007. Within minutes, experts had identified plenty of culprits: market failure, a credit culture, a wage crisis, a debt crisis, and upward redistribution of income. That's economic shorthand for fasten your seatbelt. David Sington's rigorously constructed analysis of the meltdown, told entirely by economists, brokers, bankers, and borrowers, plays like ...