AFF Alum plays LA Film Festival

Congratulations to Alan Berg whose film A PLACE TO DANCE world premiered at the LA Film Festival on Saturday. The film is an expanded version of the 2004 Austin Film Festival Audience Award winning short documentary of the same name. Berg is an adjunct professor in the journalism department at the University of Texas. The film screens again on Friday, Jun 30 at 4:45 pm at Landmark's Regent. Tickets are available here.

A Place to Dance

2006, 80 min, Color, DigiBeta
World Premiere

Directed By: Alan Berg
Screenwriter: Alan Berg
Writer: Alan Berg
Producers: Alan Berg, Troy Campbell, Anne Walker-McBay
Executive Producers: Anne Walker-McBay, Shelley Barberot, Alan Berg
Cinematographer: Matthew Franklin
Editor: Alan Berg
Music: The Pat Barberot Orchestra
Featuring: Pat Barberot, Bryan Barberot, EJ Brinkmann, Shirley Dimm, William Walsten, Al Wehmeier, Hector Penagos, Frank Alessi, Corliss Schmidt

It’s Sunday night, and the Jefferson Orleans is buzzing as veteran orchestrator Pat Barberot’s big band kicks into a sizzling rendition of “Sing, Sing, Sing.” Decked to the nines, septuagenarians and octogenarians hit the dance floor, all of them relishing this wartime era wonderland. Filmmaker Alan Berg endearingly captures a sacred New Orleans space for friendship, romance and good times. Not even the aftermath of Katrina can hamper the spirits of the club’s clientele, who remain determined to use the best of the past to enjoy the present.

Screenplay/Teleplay

The deadline for Austin Film Festival’s Screenplay/ Teleplay Competition has now passed. Over the past few weeks hundreds of screenplays/teleplays have been pouring in. They are all now eagerly waiting for readers to determine the winners in the upcoming October festival.

Paramount unveils new specialty film unit

Friday May 19 9:26 AM ET

Film studio Paramount Pictures on Friday unveiled a new division called Paramount Vantage aimed at releasing low-budget films with broad appeal to capture audiences in the expanding independent film arena.

The unit's formation is the first major move for John Lesher, who recently took the reins at Paramount's specialty film unit, Paramount Classics. It also comes as studio chairman Brad Gray continues to revamp Paramount Pictures.

Paramount Vantage aims to release eight to 10 films a year, ranging from low-budget comedies and horror films to sophisticated art house fare such as "Babel," starring Brad Pitt, which premieres this week at the Cannes film festival.

"Investing in a specialty division so that we can become competitive in this area has been a part of Brad Grey's overall vision for turning around the studio," Lesher said in a statement.

The low-budget, or "specialty" divisions of major studios have become increasingly important in recent years because the movies they produce and release are made for relatively small amounts of money, but can reap huge profits if successful.

Last year's award-winning gay romance "Brokeback Mountain," for instance, was produced for about $14 million by Universal Pictures' Focus Features specialty unit and took in $178 million at box offices worldwide.

When Gray took the reins of Paramount Pictures in 2005, one of his main goals was revamping and expanding the studio's specialty unit, Paramount Classics. Gray hired Lesher to come in and remake the division.

As part of Friday's announcement, the company said Paramount Classics would continue to exist, but now focus on films with a more narrow appeal such as foreign-language movies and documentaries like the upcoming global warming film "An Inconvenient Truth," which also is screening at Cannes.

Both Paramount Classics and Paramount Vantage will be overseen by Lesher.

Other films to be released by the new Paramount Vantage label in 2007 include Joel and Ethan Coen's "No Country for Old Men," and Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood."

Paramount Pictures and the two specialty divisions are part of the entertainment operations of Viacom Inc..

Link to article on Yahoo

Slomo Video Festival

SLOMO VIDEO is 100 one minute slow motion videos by 85 filmmakers and video artists from around the world. The video festival will swerve into cinemas around the world, transubstantiate time into taffy, and turn the usual expectations of a video show on its side and inside out. This unique compilation of cinematic slowness will pull the audience through a molasses-tinged warp of catastrophic visual and audio beauty.