deliver us from evil Tagged Articles at Cinematical

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."

It should be a green-tie affair at the opening night gala of this year's Tribeca Film Festival. The event, happening April 25, will be hosted by Al Gore and is set to feature some entertainment that will focus on the global warming issue. This entertainment is part of a partnership with the SOS (Save Our Selves) Campaign, which raises climate crisis awareness and will include live performances from some of the artists participating in SOS' Live Earth concert series happening on July 7. The acts set for the gala weren't revealed, but some of those involved with the Live Earth shows include Red Hot Chili Peppers, John Mayer, John Legend, Black Eyed Peas, Korn and Melissa Etheridge, who recently won an Oscar for the song she wrote for the Gore-featured documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Also, the night will include the premiere of seven short films, each of which deals with the problems and the solutions of the crisis and each of which is shorter than ten minutes. The directors and titles of these shorts were not yet revealed either, because the seven showcased films have not been chosen yet. They will be selected by the festival's planners from the 60 shorts that were commissioned by SOS. Some of the filmmakers who participated include Jonathan Glazer, Kevin Macdonald, Abel Ferrara, Amy Berg, Ari Sandel, the doc duo Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady and someone from Aardman Animation (Peter Lord? Nick Park?). It isn't completely made clear, but it seems that all 60 of the commissioned films will be shown during the Live Earth event. So, if you can't make it to New York City for the world premiere of the seven shorts, you can see at least those if not all of them at one of the concerts (so far the only locations announced are Shanghai, Sydney, London and Johannesburg, while the cities in the U.S., Brazil, Japan and Antarctica are TBA). I probably won't be able to attend the gala or one of the concerts, so hopefully there will be another place for me to see the films. After all, this is the best news for shorts fans since Cannes' announced its own opening night compilation.

As long as the Academy gives separate screenwriting Oscars for original screenplay and adapted screenplay, they should also consider honoring non-fiction screenplays. Not all documentaries have writers, but many do -- according to the Writers Guild of America the number of docs with writing credit has increased by 50% in recent years. That is why the WGA began awarding non-fiction screenwriters two years ago; Super-Size Me was the first to be honored.

I'm not sure why the WGA announced the doc noms separately from the rest, but in doing so the guild is allowing for the category to be given less attention. Of course, with the news that Borat is nominated for the adaptation prize, everything else about the WGA Awards is being overshadowed (I paid more notice to the Borat news, too). But I think it is important for documentary fans to know that the WGA does honor non-fiction writers. Maybe one day they'll even go and split up the category to distinguish between the original and adapted non-fiction scripts (there may not be enough of the latter, though).

The nominees for the 2007 Documentary Screenplay Award are: Deliver Us From Evil (written by Amy Berg); The Heart of the Game (written by Ward Serrill); Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos (story by John Dower and Mark Monroe; screenplay by Mark Monroe); Who Killed the Electric Car? (written by Chris Paine); Why We Fight (written by Eugene Jarecki).

It ought to be relatively easy to narrow down a list of films I've seen and liked in 2006 into a cogent top ten -- and to be fair, I whittled it down to the top 20 pretty easily -- but figuring out in just what order to rank my final ten was incredibly frustrating. How to rank a list of films, so different from each other, into a semi-ordered list that would be less than random? Equally frustrating was realizing that, in spite of the number of films I did see in 2006, there were still some great films that I missed catching, some of which might have made it onto my list had I seen them. Nonetheless, I can only rank from amongst those films I did see; here then, are my top ten films of the year.

Here at Cinematical, we know there's nothing you like more this time of year than reading all about who's nominating whom for what critics' award. The latest nominations to come down the pike are from the Windy City, where the noms are lining up with nothing terribly shocking compared to other critics' groups.

Best Pic noms include Babel, Little Miss Sunshine, The Departed, The Queen, and United 93. In fact, the Chicago critics love Babel so much they nominated Alejandro González Iñárritu's little gem of a film for no fewer than nine awards, including Brad Pitt for Best Actor, Iñárritu for Best Director, Rinko Kikuchi for Best Promising Newcomer, and assorted other goodies.

I never understood why the Golden Globes are such prestigious awards. I mean, what really makes them any different from any other critics awards? How did the Hollywood Foreign Press Association become so popular that millions of viewers tune in every year to witness the group's choices for best this and best that? I mean, they shouldn't be any more important than the International Press Academy, right?

Who? The IPA, that group that hands out the Satellite Awards. Never heard of them? Well, they just celebrated their 11th annual event on Sunday, and they're about as useless as the HFPA, only more so because they don't even get a broadcast. The IPA has more to do with the HFPA, too. The group is actually a spin-off of the more familiar awards-givers, having separated in 1996 as a broader organization (HFPA is very exclusive, IPA claims to admit any interested journalists), which explains their spin-off-sounding award name.

Hey, did you know it was awards season? The one crappy thing about all these awards and nominations is that the majority of people out there have not seen any of the films on the list. For example, The Broadcast Film Critics Association (BFCA) announced their nominations for the 12th annual Critics' Choice Awards (which is kind of like the Viewer's Choice Awards, except P. Diddy isn't hosting and everyone in the room is feverishly typing on a blackberry), and just by looking at the best picture category, I assume most folks have only seen two of the films listed. Mayyybe three. But isn't that always the case?

The wonderful thing for pics like Dreamgirls and Letters from Iwo Jima is that, with these awards and nominations pouring out ahead of their release dates, it's all free marketing. But all that does is benefit people with a lot more money than you, so let's move on. With 200 members, the BFCA is the largest critics' organization in the United States and Canada, and the actual awards ceremony will be broadcast this January 20 on E! Entertainment Television. The nice thing about these awards is the diversity; basically everyone gets to join the party. Beside your standard categories (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Screenplay, Supporting, Animated, Documentary), you have Best Ensemble, Best Young Actor, Best Young Actress, Best Comedy, Best Soundtrack and Best Family Film (Live Action) -- a category I feel should be included at the Oscars.

Any surprises? Well, Deliver Us from Evil and Jesus Camp were both left off the documentary list, and Leonardo DiCaprio was nominated twice (The Departed, Blood Diamond) in the same category, Best Actor. As far as who has the most nods, The Departed, Babel, Little Miss Sunshine and Dreamgirls each received seven.

As always, a full list of nominations is waiting for you after the jump.