Position Among the Stars, the final part of Dutch director Leonard Retel Helmrich’s trilogy about the Indonesian working-class Sjamsuddin family, will screen at Sundance 2011, the Utah-based film festival announced on December 1, 2010.
The documentary was the big winner at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in November 2010, taking home the VPRO IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary and the Dioraphte IDFA Award for Dutch Documentary.
Following its world premiere at IDFA, Position Among the Stars will have its international premiere in Sundance’s World Cinema Documentary Competition.
Wall Street Journal’s Ten to Watch
The Wall Street Journal listed the documentary among the top ten titles it predicts movie industry professionals, critics and fans will be tracking at Sundance.
Retel Helmrich previously won IDFA’s top prize in 2004 with the second part of his Indonesian trilogy, Shape of the Moon (Stand van de Maan), before going on to win Best Documentary at Sundance in 2005.
IDFA Documentaries Premiering at Sundance
Other documentaries that screened at IDFA going on to have their North American premiere at Sundance are An African Election and The Green Wave.
In An African Election (Switzerland/USA), director Jarreth Merz uses the run-up to the 2008 presidential elections in Ghana to explore a country’s hope for change and fear of conflict; while animated blogs and tweets form the basis of Ali Samadi Ahadi’s The Green Wave (Irans Grüner Sommer, Germany) a reconstruction of the tumult and violence that accompanied the Iranian elections in June 2009.
Sundance to Open with Three Movies
Sundance Film Festival has also announced it will open with not one but three films: one narrative and one documentary from both the US and World Cinema competitions, and one shorts program.
This is in line with the decision made last year, when John Cooper took over as the first new director for two decades, to highlight the film festival’s scope and steer it back to its independent, less commercial roots.
Strong Sundance Submissions
The titles of Sundance’s opening and closing movies have not yet been released, but the film festival has said that the 115 features to screen were selected from a bumper crop of 3,812 submissions (up from last year’s 3,724), 1,943 of which are from the US and 1,869 are international.
Sundance comprises six competition categories, with a further seven out-of-competition categories. A new addition in 2011 will be Documentary Premieres, a program that reflects the growing popularity of documentary storytelling.
Sundance Film Festival runs from January 20 to 30, 2011 in Park City, Utah.
Cecily Layzell - Cecily Layzell is a food and travel writer and founder of restaurant review site www.eat-amsterdam.com.
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