Directors hope to revisit past Sundance Film Festival glory

Getting a movie into Sundance is not unlike making the hurdle into a prestigious school or high-profile street gang: once in, it's almost as tough to get out.

When your film is one of 210 being selected from a stack of 8,731 submissions for the country's premier independent film showcase, alumni status can only be a good thing. As in past years, the 2008 Sundance Film Festival is welcoming back a preponderance of directors with a strong track record from previous years.

In some instances those first films went on to achieve substantial indie-film success, as was the case with movies by Morgan Spurlock and Tom McCarthy. With their sophomore efforts, the two directors have adapted their particular styles to address life in a post-9/11 world.

Spurlock, the fast-food daredevil who put his liver on the line with an all-McDonald's diet in "Super Size Me," is returning with a stunt of a very different flavor. In "Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?" the 37-year-old New Yorker goes on a manhunt to find the al-Qaida mastermind, an odyssey that spans Egypt, Morocco, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Pakistan. As with his 2004 festival hit, Spurlock injects playful graphics to make some deadly serious points.

In 2003, Tom McCarthy elicited standing ovations and multiple awards for his beautifully terse writing-directing debut "The Station Agent," in which Peter Dinklage, Patricia Clarkson and Bobby Cannavale played three disparate individuals who bond in a sleepy corner of New Jersey. McCarthy (whose frequent acting gigs include "Flags of Our Fathers" and "The Wire") reasserts his interest in the connective tissue of unconnected souls in "The Visitor," which stars Richard Jenkins as an economics professor who finds common ground, quite literally, with a Lebanese man and his Senegalese wife, whom he discovers squatting in his Manhattan apartment.

Craig Lucas is another Sundance veteran accustomed to swapping hats, having made inroads as a musical theater performer, switched to writing plays ("Prelude to a Kiss," "Blue Window") and films ("Longtime Companion," "The Secret Lives of Dentists"), then expanded to directing the film version of his Off-Broadway drama "The Dying Gaul." Lucas sticks to directing on "Birds of America," a quirky comedy of sibling tensions with a cast that features Matthew Perry, Ginnifer Goodwin, Hilary Swank, Lauren Graham and Ben Foster.