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In this week's edition of Indie Roundup, we look back on a busy week for acquisitions, upcoming film awards, and two fests.

Deals. The Garden, nominated this year for an Academy Award for Best Documentary, was picked up by Oscilloscope and will be released to theaters in the spring and on DVD this summer, according to indieWIRE. Directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy, the film follows a long court battle to save the South Central Farm, a community produce garden that sprang up in the wake of the 1992 riots in Los Angeles.

With the unfortunate demise of New Yorker Films, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's critically-acclaimed Three Monkeys will now be distributed by Zeitgeist Films. The theatrical release planned for this month will be delayed to April.

Other films receiving deals, per indieWIRE, with distributor and release dates noted: Roger Spottiswoode's Shake Hands with the Devil (Regent Releasing, Summer 2009); Lee Isaac Chung's Munyurangabo (Film Movement, late May 2009); and John Walter's Theater of War (Alive Mind, April 2009)

Awards. What, you thought the Academy Awards had the final word? Still to come are the Cinema Eye Honors on Sunday, March 29. Given in celebration of nonfiction films and filmmakers, the nominees include cinematographers, editors, composers, and graphic designers.

Box Office. In its second week of release at a single theater in New York, Andrzej Wajda's historical drama Katyn increased its take, earning $14,206. That indicates strong word of mouth. "Katyn is the name of the forest where the Soviets secretly murdered 15,000 Polish officers, intellectuals and professionals over a 3-day period in 1940 (Wajda's father among them)," according to publicity materials for the film. Distributor Koch-Lorber Films has more information. The dramatic trailer is embedded below.

After the jump: A tale of two festivals: Tribeca and True/False.

OK, I think this is the last narrowing-down-the-list that will occur before the actual Oscar nominations are announced a week from Thursday. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has whittled the candidates in the Best Foreign-Language category to these nine semi-finalists. It is from these that the five nominees will be chosen:

Revanche, Austria; The Necessities of Life, Canada; The Class, France; The Baader Meinhof Complex, Germany; Waltz with Bashir, Israel; Departures, Japan; Tear This Heart Out, Mexico; Everlasting Moments, Sweden; Three Monkeys, Turkey.

If the Turkish film is nominated, it will be a first for that country, which has submitted a film every year since 1992 but has never made the Big 5. The other countries have all been nominated before, though Mexico and Israel have never won.

These nine shortlist contenders were culled from 67 entries. After embarrassing situations in previous years where the Academy's stodgy old foreign-language nominating committee neglected films that should have at least made the shortlist, a new rule was implemented this year that allowed that group to choose only six of the nine semi-finalists. The other three were chosen by the Academy's "foreign-film executive committee," which skews younger and less boring. The Academy didn't say which films on the shortlist came from which group, though.

As you probably know, each country is permitted to submit only one film per year. If you want to see what everyone submitted this year -- and rail against the Academy for not shortlisting, say, Italy's Gomorra or Jordan's Captain Abu Raed -- the complete list is here.

Mike Jones over at Variety's The Circuit Blog posted yesterday the first 27 films announced for the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)and, not surprisingly, most of them hail from previous fest premieres at Cannes, Berlin and SXSW.

The Gala Presentation will be South Korean director Kim Jee-woon's The Good, The Bad and The Weird, which I saw at Cannes earlier this year and loved. Somewhat reminiscent of Tears of the Black Tiger, the film is a crazy, busy Western that centers around a map to a treasure happened upon by a (seemingly) bumbling fool, who ends up being pursued by a good-guy law-enforcement type, a wicked bad guy dressed in black, and, at one point, an entire army. It runs a little long, but it's funny and sharp, with a spectacular chase sequence near the end and a nice final payoff. Toronto film fans should really enjoy this one.

What were the surprises at this year's Cannes Film Festival? Does the showcasing of films like Waltz with Bashir and Che at the world's premier film festival mean that traditional film making has been replaced by a new wave of technology and technique? Which factor had more to do with the lower-than-expected number of sales at this year's Cannes Festival -- weak films, or the weak dollar? Is there a subtle subtext to the past few years at Cannes, and what were the films that got away this year? Joining us this week to talk about all these topics and more is Glenn Kenny, the former film critic for Premiere who's now blogging independently at Some Came Running. Cinematical's podcast is now available through iTunes; you can subscribe at this link. Also, you can listen directly here at Cinematical by clicking below:



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Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's film Three Monkeys, playing in competition at Cannes, uses the metaphor of the proverbial three monkeys (see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil) to explore ideas about errors of judgment that blow up into unexpected consequences. The film's opening shot is a man driving a lonely road at night. Half-asleep at the wheel, he runs over a pedestrian in the road. Shortly after, another car drives up, sees the body on the road, but drives on, pausing only to take the license number of the car that hit him.

The hit-and-run driver, as it turns out, is a politician in the midst of a re-election battle. He calls his driver, Eyup (Yavuz Bingol) and convinces him to take the fall for the accident, with the promise of a hefty payday after he finishes a nine-month stint in prison for his boss's crime.