The Sundance Film Festival has unveiled its 2012 competition lineup, announcing that "110 feature-length films were selected, representing 31 countries and 44 first-time filmmakers, including 26 in competition. These films were selected from 4,042 feature-length film submissions composed of 2,059 US and 1,983 international feature-length films. 88 films at the Festival will be world premieres…. On Day One, the Festival will screen one narrative film and one documentary from both the US and World Cinema competitions, as well as one shorts program."
And those four films are Todd Louiso's Hello I Must Be Going (US Dramatic Competition), Lauren Greenfield's The Queen of Versailles (US Documentary Competition), Kieran Darcy-Smith's Wish You Were Here (World Cinema Dramatic Competition — image above) and Malik Bendjelloul's Searching for Sugar Man (World Cinema Documentary Competition). Click here to see titles and synopses for all four programs.
The festival runs from January 19 through 29.
Updates: Ioncinema's Eric Lavallee on the highlights of the World Cinema Dramatic Competition: "Of all the 14 films/filmmakers mentioned we see Quentin Dupieux return to screen fairly quick after his debut film Rubber…. We have Dogtooth writer Efthymis Filippou contributing to helmer Babis Makridis's debut film L and finally Czech director Bohdan Sláma (The Country Teacher (2009) and Something Like Happiness (2005)) coming to the festival with 4 Suns." In the US Dramatic Competition, he notes that a "pair of films from our favorite auteurs So Yong Kim's For Ellen and Antonio Campos's Simon Killer are finally making their long awaited world film fest debuts and items from an emerging talent base in the likes of Benh Zeitlin, Ry Russo-Young and James Ponsoldt."
In the US Documentary Competition: "We've got some heavy hitters among docu filmmakers such as Don Argott, Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady, Lori Silverbush, Kirby Dick, Lauren Greenfield and Eugene Jarecki." And he sees the World Cinema Documentary Competition "dominated by the Danes (Mads Brügger, Lise Birk Pedersen, Malik Bendjelloul and docu team Omar Shargawi and Karim El Hakim)."
At indieWIRE, Brian Brooks and Eric Kohn talk with festival director John Cooper and head of programming, Trevor Groth, about their choices.
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