Have you been reading Cinematical Indie lately? If not, here's what you've been missing ...

COLUMNS, REVIEWS, and INTERVIEWS

• Matt Bradshaw reviews Hollywood After Dark -- with the guys from MST3K!!! -- for Killer Bs on DVD.
• Nick Schager reviews Your Mommy Kills Animals
• Podcast: On The Rocchi Review, James Rocchi chats it up with Andrew Grant, the voice behind one of my fave film blogs, Like Anna Karina's Sweater, and Aaron Hillis, who reviews film for the likes of Variety The Village Voice and Premiere. Both guys are also the brains behind Benten Films, which will release Joe Swanberg's LOL on DVD August 27 28.
• Erik Davis interviews Four Eyed Monsters Co-Director Arin Crumley. The guys talked so much we had to break it into two parts, so be sure to check out both Part One and Part Two.
• Jeffrey M. Andersons 400 Screens, 400 Blows: Coming to America
• Cinematical Indie Chat: Deliver Us from Evil director Amy Berg.
• RvB's' After Images: Zouk's Lair in Mr. Arkadin.
• Review: alleyball
• James Rocchi interviews No End In Sight director Charles Ferguson.

... and more, much more, right after the jump ...

**Thanks, Aaron, for the corrections ...

We're trying out something new here on Cinematical Indie: Cinematical Indie Chats, short-form email or AIM interviews with indie filmmakers wherein we'll chat with them about indie film, what they're working on, what they love and hate, and whatever else they want to share with us.

First up is Deliver Us from Evil director Amy Berg, who very kindly took time out of her busy schedule to chat with us through email. Coming up next week we'll have a chat with Billy the Kid director Jennifer Venditti, and we have lots of other indie filmmakers in the line-up as well. If there's someone you particularly want to hear from, let us know, and we'll do our darndest to line them up for you.

And hey, if you're an indie filmmaker and you'd like to chat with us, drop me a line at kim(at)cinematical(dot)com.

What indie films out in theaters or DVDs have you been watching lately?

Have you been reading Cinematical Indie lately? If not, here's what you've been missing ...


INDIE FILM GRAB BAG

• Atom Egoyan will start shooting on his newest film, Adoration, this fall -- his first since 2005's Where the Truth Lies.
• Cinematical Indie Seven: Documentaries worth catching on DVD ...
• Deliver Us From Evil director Amy Berg (pictured) talks to Cinematical Indie about the $660 million payout by the Catholic Church to victims of clergy sexual abuse, and how she feels about Cardinal Roger Mahony's "apology" to the victims.

FEST NEWS

• Michael Moore's Traverse City Film Fest announces its lineup, which includes some retro films (Grease, Raiders of the Lost Ark). It's Michael Moore's fest, so it's a given that there are plenty of social-issue films, but there will also be other fest fare like Waitress, Paprika and The King of Kong.
• Heading to a slightly more exotic locale, news from the Thessaloniki Film Festival is that the fest will be honoring one of Monika's fave directors, John Sayles, with a "Golden Alexander." The fest will also screen the European premiere of Sayle's latest film, Honeydripper (Monika wrote earlier this month about Honeydripper being selected for Toronto ... busy year for Sayles.
• The Middle East International Film Festival, announced at Cannes earlier this year, has a Festival Director: film fest veteran Jon Fitzgerald, who helped launch Slamdance and has worked for AFI and, well, lots of other fests. The fest will be held in October in Abu Dhabi, and the main site of the fest is the truly stunning Emirates Palace. Seems like the organizers of the fest intend to make it a major business-oriented fest with lots of deal-making going on ... it will be interesting to see how Fitzgerald grows the fest, and if it eventually becomes a key fest for dealmakers -- kind of like the Toronto or Sundance of the Middle East. Interesting ...
• The AFI Dallas Film Fest has announced its call for entries for 2008, the second year of the fest, so get your films submitted.
• Cinematical Indie gears up for our coverage of the major fall film fests, Telluride, Toronto and Venice.

DEALS and DISTRIBUTION

• Just when we got all excited about the July 20 release of one of our fave flicks from Toronto last year, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, things got curiouser and curiouser, culminating with the announcement that -- too bad, so sad -- we're going to have to wait until 2008 for the film's official release now. Wha --? Poor Mandy -- first, she didn't get a freaking poster until two weeks before her release date, then she got dumped by the Weinsteins' Dimension and acquired by Senator Entertainment. But never fear, the Brothers Weinstein have a positive spin on the bizarre dumping of the film, saying that Senator will give Mandy a wider release than they had planned for her, and Senator already owned her German rights anyhow ... and there's less competition in the film's new release slot (and, just maybe, the horror genre will recover from the dreadful opening of Captivity by then -- though Elisha Cuthbert's career may not). Ah, Mandy. The guys dying to see the film will just have to wait a while longer ... but I guess as long as a girl is trading up, it's all good.
• Speaking of the Weinstein boys, The Weinstein Company (TWC) also acquired Benny Chan's Invisible Target ... and Peter Martin ponders whether this one might head straight to DVD ...
• Here! Films picks up Tribeca player Fat Girls, while First Run (finally, it's about time someone did) acquires one of my own fave Sundance flicks, For the Bible Tells Me So.

INDIES ONLINE AND ON DVD

• Robert Bresson's first film, Les Anges du Péché, finally gets a DVD release, but you have to buy it from a French website.
• Willy Wiggins reinvents The Outlaw Son.
• Peter Martin writes up the latest indie DVD releases, including his top pick-of-the-week, Avenue Montaigne.

A couple days ago, Cardinal Roger Mahony, bishop of the Los Angeles diocese, made a public apology to the over 500 victims of alleged sexual abuse by priests he was in charge of, and announced a $660 million payout to the victims. While Father Oliver O'Grady, the priest profiled in the documentary Deliver Us From Evil, was not one of the priests this specific settlement dealt with, the film, directed by Amy Berg, has played a crucial role in bringing the issue to light and drawing the attention of the district attorney's office to Mahony.

Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart played a brief clip of Mahony's apology, in which he said he was sorry to "anyone who might have been offended ... " Offended, as Stewart noted, hardly seems the right word to use when you are supposedly apologizing to people who were sexually molested as children by priests under your charge. I emailed Berg this morning about the payout, her film's impact on the case, and Mahony's apology, and this is what she had to say (Berg's response in its entirety is after the jump ... ):

Can't get enough of great docs? You may have missed these during their fest runs, but you can still catch them on DVD. Here are seven documentaries from the last couple years that are well worth seeing, if you haven't caught them yet ...

1) Deliver Us From Evil -- Amy Berg's wrenchingly painful documentary about Oliver O'Grady (pictured, above), a pedophile priest who was moved around from parish to parish to prey on unsuspecting families by his boss, Cardinal Roger Mahony , now Archbishop of Los Angeles (who just a couple days ago, announced a $660 million pre-trial settlement of sexual abuse cases involving other priests), in spite of Mahony's knowledge of O'Grady's penchant for raping children, is a must see, and frankly, I'm shocked that more people haven't seen this Oscar-nommed film. It was by far the most powerful film I saw at last year's Toronto International Film Festival last year. If you haven't seen this film, get it in your DVD rental queue post haste.

2) Jesus Camp -- Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing have kind of take the documentary world by storm the past couple of years, with two back-to-back years of being on the feature-length documentary Oscar short list (hey, it's only a matter of time before they win, trust me). In 2005 they made the excellent Boys of Baraka (also worth catching on DVD if you want to have yourself a Rachel-and-Heidi weekend), and then they hit the ball out of the park again with Jesus Camp, about which our own James Rocchi said, "The best horror film I've seen all year is a documentary."

Yesterday we told you about the big new out of Los Angeles: The Los Angeles Archdiocese announced the payout of $60 million in reparations to 45 victims of clergy sexual abuse. Cardinal Roger Mahony, who heads the Archdiocese, was prominently featured in the Oscar short-listed documentary Deliver Us from Evil, for his alleged role in moving pedophile priest Father Oliver O'Grady from parish to parish, where he preyed on hundreds of young victims.

The Los Angeles Archdiocese currently has over 500 pending cases from alleged victims of clergy abuse, many of them naming Mahony in his supervisory capacity. Cinematical managed to track down Deliver Us from Evil director Amy Berg, who very graciously agreed to share with our readers her thoughts on Mahony, the payout by the Archdiocese, and the role her film may have played in helping to bring about the settlement.

In an announcement this morning, Cardinal Roger Mahony, who is featured prominently in Amy Berg's Oscar-shortlisted documentary Deliver Us From Evil, disclosed that the Los Angeles Archdiocese will pay out $60 million to abuse victims. Although $60 million seems like a huge sum, the payout only covers 45 victims - -just 8% of the 562 claims against the LA Archdiocese -- who will receive approximately $1.3 million each. Mahony was quote in a story in the Los Angeles Times as saying that $40 million of that total had been held back from last year, and that parishes will not feel the hit of the payout, but that there will be "more pain" as the rest of the claims are settled.

You know how I feel about the proliferation of film festivals all over the globe, but as this particular one happens to be in my own backyard, I guess I can make an exception ... this time. Which film festival gets this special treatment? Why, it's the Film Independent Los Angeles Film Festival of course.

According to Variety, the festival announced this week that on October 24 it will start accepting submissions for the 13th annual event, held June 21 - July 1 2007 in Los Angeles. The entry deadline for short films and music videos is Feb. 9, while the deadline for feature-length narrative and documentary films is March 1. And, if you act now (or at least before January 12) you can even get a discount on your entry fees. Not a bad thing considering the minuscule budgets of most of these films.

Some of last years fest winners include Steve Collins, writer/director of Gretchen, who won for best narrative feature and Amy Berg, writer/director of Deliver Us From Evil, (which our own Kim reviewed) who won for best documentary feature. Both winners received $50,000, money they will probably use to pay off all the credit cards they maxed out to finance their films. Oscar-winning actress and producer Charlize Theron, whose indie credits include Monster and the documentary East of Havana, was also awarded the Spirit of Independence Award for her commitment to artistic independence in film at the event.

Especially of note for aspiring filmmakers looking for exposure is that the Los Angeles Film Festival is a qualifying fest in all categories for not only the Independent Spirit Awards but for the Academy Awards' short film categories as well. So indie filmmakers, dust off those scripts hidden in your drawer, borrow your parents' video camera, gather your friends, find a barn and start shooting because the next Academy Award for short films might just go to you. (And if it does, Cinematical wants a spot in that acceptance speech.)

Note: This review originally ran during the Toronto International Film Festival. It is being rerun now in conjunction with the film's opening this weekend. - ed

A child being sexually molested by a trusted adult is bad enough; when the molester is the Catholic priest from the parish the child has grown up with, the horror is magnified that much more. Not only is there all the usual shattering of trust and innocence that is the inevitable fallout of a child victimized by a predator, but the child's spiritual faith is shattered as well. In her powerful documentary Deliver Us From Evil, Amy Berg delves headfirst into the murky waters of pedophilia in the Catholic priesthood and the Church's culpability in covering it up, as told through the stories of three of the hundreds of victims of Catholic priest Oliver O'Grady, known to the families who trusted him as "Father Ollie."

What makes Berg's film both amazing and incredibly wrenching is that she was able to interview Father O'Grady extensively for the film. Almost as if he's using the camera as his own private confessional booth, O'Grady talks candidly about his problem -- being sexually attracted to children -- and how he used the position of spiritual trust granted him by the Church's authority to molest and rape the children of his parishes. You can't help but be chilled watching O'Grady -- an innocuous-looking older man now, with white hair and twinkling eyes, smile as he talks about getting sexually aroused by young children in their underwear, and smirk as he discusses being forgiven his sins by confessing them to another priest, as if his victims were chalkboards he could scribble all over and then erase.

Deliver Us From Evil, director Amy Berg's scathing indictment of Father Oliver O'Grady, a pedophiliac priest who was transferred around northern California for over 20 years while he preyed on young children in his parishes, has created quite a furor in Los Angles and revived interest in the actions of Cardinal Roger Mahony, who directly supervised O'Grady for five of the years he was actively molesting young children. In the film, O'Grady, who now lives in Ireland after being deported from the United States upon completion of a prison sentence for the molestation of two young boys, says that he was able to abuse children for so long in part because of the actions of Cardinal Mahony, who now heads the Los Angeles Archdiocese -- the largest in the country.

William Hodgman, top deputy of the target crimes division in Los Angeles, said in the report in the New York Times that the doc "will fuel ongoing consideration as to whether Cardinal Mahony and others engaged in criminal activity." Michael Hennigan, an attorney for the archdiocese, fired back that "If Mr. Hodgman is suggesting in any way that the cardinal is the subject of a criminal investigation, he is being irresponsible and in our judgment is committing prosecutorial misconduct."