The Toronto International Film Festival is over, we have a couple months respite before Sundance, so naturally thoughts turn to the Oscar race. While I'm as curious as anyone else which films will end up garnering the big nod (and I will be really surprised if Juno doesn't get a few noms, especially for screenwriting), as an indie girl I'm most interested in the docs and foreigns. I'm a documentary dork, and one of the things I most look forward to covering at any given film fest is the doc slate -- which, as both David Poland and Anne Thompson have noted in post-Toronto columns, have been weak this year relative to the past couple years. No one really seems to be sure why this is, exactly, although the surprising success of March of the Penguins in 2005 fueled an interest in documentaries that led, perhaps, to a bit of a glut.

The trouble with documentaries is that, penguin love aside, docs are not something your average person is going to go out of their way to shell out ten bucks to see at a theater. Rent from the video store or add to your Netflix queue, perhaps, but when you're looking for a film to see on date night, the depressing topics that tend to make up much of the available documentary fare are not really the first thing that comes to mind. When's the last time you said, "Hey, honey, I know what to do tonight -- let's get dinner at that place over in Little Italy we like, and then let's go see that new Iraq war doc!" Given a choice between a bummer doc and, say, Superbad, most folks are going to opt for the laughs over the conscience-pricking dose of reality.

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.

One of my fave films at Sundance this year was For the Bible Tells Me So, a documentary exploring the disconnect between what most Christians believe about homosexuality versus what the Bible actually has to say on the subject and,in particular, the way the Christian right has used misinterpretation of the Biblical take on the issue to shut homosexuals out of their faiths.

Director Daniel Karslake scored some amazing interviews to flesh out the film, including Bishop Desmond Tutu, Rabbi Zachary Mayer, and, at the center of the film, Episcopalian Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay man to be elected Bishop of that denomination. Robinson's election was controversial and divisive, and he and his partner received so many death threats that he had to wear a bullet-proof vest under his robes at his consecration (because Jesus was all about the death threats, right?)

For the Bible Tells Me So, a documentary showing at the Sundance Film Festival, explores the issue of religion and homosexuality through personal interviews with five families whose spiritual lives collided with their real lives when they learned a loved one was gay. Director Daniel Karslake and Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay man to be elected Bishop of the Episcopalian Church, were on-hand for the fest, and sat down with Cinematical for a chat about the film.

"The Bible is the word of God through the word of human beings, speaking in the idiom of their time,and the richness of the Bible comes from the fact that we don't take it as literally so that it was dictated by God." -- Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

The last few years have brought some important documentaries: Alex Gibney's Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room, Amy Berg's Deliver Us from Evil; and Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth, just to name a few. 2007 is young, but Sundance is always a great opportunity to sample the documentary waters, and my favorite doc at Sundance this year was For the Bible Tells Me So, an exploration of the religious right's use of the Bible to justify shutting homosexuals out of the faiths in which they've grown up.