A driving force behind the US independent cinema movement, Jonas Mekas will be a guest at the sixth Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, which will present a short season of his work.
Now 75, Mekas was born in Lithuania and was put in German labour camps during the second World War. Moving to New York in the late 1940s, he became the first film critic for the Village Voice and he began to make his own experimental films in the 1960s.
New movies already confirmed for the festival include Swoon director Tom Kalin's Savage Grace, which features Julianne Moore, Stephen Dillane and Eddie Redmayne.
Director Joel Conroy and producer Margo Harkin will introduce the world premiere of Wave Riders, their documentary on surfing off the northwest coast of Ireland.
The festival will show Katyn, the new film from the great Polish director Andrzej Wajda, and there will be a special screening of FW Pabst's 1929 classic Pandora's Box, starring Louise Brooks and accompanied by a live performance of the score by 3epkano. The festival runs from February 15th to 24th. www.dubliniff.com
Our friends in the North
Now filming in Northern Ireland, Man on the Run is a thriller set there in the 1980s and features Jim Sturgess (from Across the Universe) as an IRA informer, with Rose McGowan (Death Proof) as his girlfriend and Ben Kingsley as a Special Branch agent. The movie's Canadian director Kari Skogland loosely based her screenplay on Martin McGartland's autobiography, Fifty Dead Men Walking, so titled because McGartland believes his undercover activities saved that many lives between 1987 and 1991.
Murder most foul
An Oscar winner for Gandhi, Ben Kingsley is next set to join Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo and Michelle Williams in Martin Scorsese's imminent production, Shutter Island, based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, the author of Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone. In what will be his fourth film for Scorsese, DiCaprio plays a US marshal investigating the escape of a multiple murderer from a mental asylum on a remote New England island in 1954.
Short for Sundance
From the thousands of short films submitted for next month's Sundance Film Festival in the US, Simon Fitzmaurice's The Sound of People is one of 19 films selected for the short drama competition. It features young Belfast actor Martin McCann, who will be seen later this month in Richard Attenborough's Closing the Ring.
Two short films by Irish director Ken Wardrop - Packets of Ten and Scoring - will be shown in the documentary shorts section at Sundance. Wardrop received an honourable mention from the jury when his Undressing My Mother was shown at Sundance last year.
Green Porno, a short film directed by Isabella Rossellini, and Welcome, a short directed by Kirsten Dunst and featuring Winona Ryder, will also be screened at Sundance.
Milking it
Gus Van Sant has won the race to make a film on Harvey Milk, the gay San Francisco politician murdered by political opponent Dan White in 1978. Shooting starts next month on Van Sant's film, Milk, which will star Sean Penn in the title role, with James Franco as his lover and Emile Hirsch (from Penn's Into the Wild) as a gay rights activist. Josh Brolin is likely to play White.
Van Sant has got a significant headstart on director Bryan Singer, now busy in post-production on the Tom Cruise film, Valkyrie, set to open next summer. To complicate matters, Singer's project, based on the Randy Shilts book The Mayor of Castro Street, could not go ahead anyhow because the screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie (who scripted Singer's The Usual Suspects) was not handed in before the screenwriters' strike started. Milk has been the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary feature (The Times of Harvey Milk, 1984), two TV movies and an opera.
