Films about Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the environment are among a crowded lineup as the 2007 Sundance Film Festival swung into gear this week.
The 10-day snow-covered extravaganza formally got under way yesterday with a screening of the hard-hitting documentary Chicago 10, which depicts the violence that erupted around the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
The US movie is one of 122 feature films to be shown at the festival, which has steadily grown in size since its launch in 1981 and now attracts hordes of movie industry heavyweights, celebrities and media.
Geoffrey Gilmore, the director of the Sundance Film Festival, said this year's event promised to offer a more global perspective, offering 82 world premieres with films from 25 countries.
While the festival is traditionally viewed as a marketplace for independent filmmakers to showcase their talent, several eagerly anticipated films premiering at the event feature established Hollywood stars.
Hollywood mainstays such as Samuel L. Jackson and Justin Timberlake headline Black Snake Moan while Michael Douglas gets festival top billing in King of California.
Meanwhile, John Cusack offers a powerful performance in Grace is Gone, about a patriot father whose wife is killed in Iraq.
Queen Latifah has the leading role in Life Support, a film about drug addiction, while stars Nick Nolte and Roy Schieder lend their voices to Chicago 10.
Star talent helps but movie moguls will also be searching for the next commercial gem or innovative buzz film of the year such as Little Miss Sunshine, Napoleon Dynamite or Super Size Me.
This year's films were selected from 3,287 feature submissions.
The Sundance Film Festival is the premier exhibition for US and international independent film.
The festival is the centerpiece of the Sundance Institute, a nonprofit cultural organization founded by movie icon Robert Redford in 1981. Held in and around Park City, Utah, the festival runs Jan. 18 to Jan. 28.
Meanwhile in Oscar-related news, nine foreign-language films are a step closer to an Academy Award nomination.
For the first time, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences unveiled a short list of potential nominees from a record 61 qualifying films in the category.
The nine movies in the running: Days of Glory from Algeria, Water from Canada, After the Wedding from Denmark, Avenue Montaigne from France, The Lives of Others from Germany, Pan's Labyrinth from Mexico, Black Book from the Netherlands, Volver from Spain and Vitus from Switzerland.
From among the nine, a committee of voters in Los Angeles and New York will select the five Academy Award nominees.
Nominations will be announced Tuesday. The awards will be presented Feb. 25.
Singapore's National Library Board and the Asian Film Archive have inked a pact to preserve the works of the region's filmmakers, they said Tuesday.
The two Singapore-based organizations will set up a public reference library to house movies made by Asian filmmakers, they said in a statement.
"As Singapore aims to be an arts hub, media literacy of local and Asian cinema would no doubt play an important role in equipping our community with critical viewing skills," said Ngian Lek Choh, deputy chief executive of the National Library Board (NLB).
"The collaboration will also ensure that unpublished local films as well as rare and significant Asian-centric films can now be archived, preserved and shared among the community where it was not available commercially before," she said.
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