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| A Winning Double Act |
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A year ago, a film developed at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute won the top prize in Berlin. It was not an American film - not even an English-language film - but a Brazilian film spoken in Portuguese: Walter Salles' Central do Brasil (Central Station). This year, another movie developed at the Sundance Institute could also make a huge impression in Berlin. Although this picture is American, most of the dialogue is in Vietnamese. It is Tony Bui's Three Seasons, which premiered in competition in Sundance on 23 January and went on to become the first film to win both the Grand Prix and the Audience Award. The film's cinematographer, Lisa Rinzler, also won top honours. Sundance and Berlin - separated by 8,400 kilometres but just 10 days - offer a powerful combination to open the year. Many executives attend both events, which have become key dates on the industry calendar. Three Seasons is not the only film in competition in Berlin to have made its debut during Sundance. Robert Altman's Cookie's Fortune, which will screen here on 20 February, opened America's premier festival and has been well received by the critics, many of whom believe it to be the director's best work in decades. Other films that are using the double slingshot of Sundance and Berlin to launch themselves globally include Mike Figgis' The Loss of Sexual Innocence; Tim Roth's The War Zone; Jim Fall's Trick; Jennifer Fox's An American Love Story; Cauleen Smith's Drylongso; Andrew Shea's The Corndog Man; Martin Rejtman's Silvia Prieto; and Roko Belic's remarkable Genghis Blue, which won the Audience Award on offer in Sundance for the many documentaries screening. And the traffic is not all one way, with Sundance opening up world and premiere sections to films from around the globe. This year they included the US premiere of Tom Tykwer's Run Lola, Run, which ended up sharing the World Cinema Audience Award with Radu Mihaileanu's French production, Train de Vie. Christopher Pickard |