Hollywood meets the world in Sundance line-up

Hollywood A-listers Jon Hamm, Olivia Wilde and Russell Crowe will rub shoulders with some of cinema's best and brightest new talent at the Sundance film festival next month, organisers said on Wednesday.
The first edition of the festival since the death in September of founder Robert Redford will see a firmament of stars descend on Park City, Utah for one of the most important gatherings in the global movie calendar.
'I think that this is going to be such a celebratory year and a very special one', Sundance director of programming Kim Yutani said.
'Any time you can bring together such an eclectic group of artists and storytellers... I think about Charli XCX and Billie Jean King, Salman Rushdie, Rinko Kikuchi together... it's such a special (group) of people that we can have on the mountain'.
A rich vein of comedy runs through this year's programme, said Yutani.
'There are films that are looking at things in a kind of more quirky and unique way, like 'The History of Concrete' by John Wilson, which is going to have its own enthusiastic audience', she said.
International
With the movie industry still struggling to find its feet after successive blows from the streaming revolution, the Covid pandemic and Hollywood strikes that crippled Tinseltown in 2023, the involvement of such famous faces is a vote of confidence in independent filmmaking, said festival programmer John Nein.
'When you see Chris Pine and Jenny Slate in 'Carousel', or when you see Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan in 'Josephine'... that's one of the signs of optimism at a time when we are looking at some real challenges in the sector, that notable actors continue to want to be involved in these projects', he said.
Sundance received more than 16,000 submissions, whittling them down to 90 feature-length films, with 40 per cent of them from first-time feature directors.
All but a handful of the titles that will be screened in the festival's snow-capped Rocky Mountain base will be world premieres, selected from 164 countries and territories around the globe.
Sundance, which runs from January 22 to February 1, is being held in Utah for the final time before a move to Boulder, Colorado in 2027.
Festival and public programming director Eugene Hernandez said the final Park City edition, along with Redford's death, makes this a significant year.
'We reach this pinnacle of our experience in Utah this year', he said. 'It's going to be a special edition'. — AFP