Sundance huge for foreign artists

PARK CITY — Of the estimated 1,200 press and media credentials issued for this year's Sundance Film Festival, about 227 were issued to foreign media, representing at least 20 different countries.

Sundance is big in the United States, but it continues to reach an increasingly wider audience overseas. For foreign filmmakers, getting accepted into Sundance is huge.

"It is very important," said Andrea Jublin, who was taking a break Sunday at a Park City hotel.

The festival is very "famous" in Italy, maybe the "most famous festival for independent film," Jublin added. He described his 15-minute film "Il Supplente" as a very "strange" comedy. "It's a short film about the tragedy of being what you're not," he said.

Jublin's goal now is to use his Sundance standing as a way "to find someone that believes in me and gives me money," he said with a laugh.

At the other end of the seriousness scale, director/screenwriter Shimon Dotan crafted the documentary "Hot House," which gives viewers an up-close look inside Israeli prisons. It's billed as having uncovered how those prisons have become a "breeding ground for the next generation of Palestinian leaders and a hotbed for terrorist plots."

Dotan's film has been accepted in film festivals around the world. But if a film project is a success at Sundance, Dotan said it will be popular in Israel and other countries that host independent film festivals.

"That's very much a trend going on," Dotan said while on Main Street in Park City Saturday. "Sundance is considered the number one festival in many parts of the world. Sundance carries a lot of weight."

That's also true, for the most part, in the United Kingdom.

Some titles in this year's festival that carry a U.K. identifier include "Crossing the Line," "In the Shadow of the Moon," "Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten," "A Very British Gangster," "How Is Your Fish Today?" and several others.

Amber Wilkinson flew in from Scotland to cover Sundance for the third year in a row. She writes for the Web site www.eyeforfilm.com. One of the films she was reporting on while in Park City included "Red Road," a movie about a woman whose job it is to keep track of video surveillance on a one-block stretch of Red Road. The movie has already had a release in Scotland, where Sundance is still gaining recognition.