Sundance Announces Lineup For 2009 Festival

The Sundance Film Festival will be held Jan 15-25, 2009, with screenings and activities at various locations around Park City and Salt Lake City.

The New York Times has this new article about the festival, and its 2009 films. Below are excerpts.

The programmers of the Sundance Film Festival on Wednesday announced a schedule of competition films that in their view, reflect an unusual tilt toward the emotional — maybe even melodramatic — side of independent cinema.

"Audiences this year are going to be surprised," Geoffrey Gilmore, the director of the festival, said this week in a far-ranging discussion of the mood and makeup of the 2009 program. "The range of emotions evoked by the films is going to be greater than in the past."

The festival's flavor is also going to be a bit more international. Submissions from the United States fell, after years of steady increases, to 1,905 feature-length films, from 2,021 in 2008, while foreign submissions rose to 1,756, from 1,603. The 118 features selected (including noncompetition films still to be announced) were chosen from 3,661 submissions, up slightly from 3,624, despite a weakening independent movie market.

Read the entire article.