Austin is All Over Sundance 2010

The Sundance 2010 lineup was announced over several days last week, and you can find Austin connections everywhere. We may not have had a huge amount of representation in the Spirit Award nominations, but Sundance is almost as Austin-y as SXSW this year. Okay, I'm exaggerating, but it's still exciting.

The biggest Austin-y news is that local filmmaker/AFS staffer Bryan Poyser's feature film Lovers of Hate is one of the films in competition at Sundance this year. If you've been reading Poyser's blog, you know all about it (well, not all, but a lot of interesting stuff). The film is about two brothers attracted to the same woman.

Lovers of Hate was shot in Park City last year after Poyser (pictured above) attended Sundance, and also here in Austin. The cast includes a number of locals, including filmmaker Alex Karpovsky (Trust Me, This is All Made Up; and Poyser played his roomie in Andrew Bujalski's Beeswax), Chris Doubek (Harmony and Me, Poyser's The Cassidy Kids), and Heather Kafka (the "unfit mother" at Carl's Jr. in Idiocracy). The cinematographer is David Lowery (St. Nick), sometimes of Austin and Dallas, the producers include Jay and Mark Duplass, I could go on and on with local ties. I hope we'll get the chance to see it here at SXSW 2010.

More films with Austin connections:

• Speaking of the Duplass brothers, Lovers of Hate isn't the only reason they'll be at Sundance. The former Austinites have had their third feature, made for Fox Searchlight, selected for the out-of-competition part of the festival. The film, which Sundance calls Untitled Duplass Brothers Project and IMDb lists as Cyrus, is also about a relationship entanglement: John C. Reilly and Marisa Tomei's characters encounter romance interference from Tomei's son, played by Jonah Hill. The cast also includes Catherine Keener, and Baghead's Steve Zissis.
• Local filmmakers David and Nathan Zellner (Goliath) are back at Sundance with their latest short film, Fiddlestixx. The description? "Fiddlestixx is about a monkey. A very special monkey." Oh, dear. Seriously, it's based on a web series that the Zellners created earlier this year. We hear that Wiley Wiggins is also developing a game related to the character.
• The documentary shorts lineup includes Quadrangle, made by local filmmaker Amy Grappell, about 1970s couples experimenting with group marriage. The documentary was formerly known as Long Island, and under that title received a Texas Filmmakers Production Fund grant earlier this year.
• Austin Movie Blog tells us that another short documentary with local connections at Sundance will be Thompson. The coming-of-age film was produced by Elizabeth Mims from Austin, who is currently in school in California. If this movie sounds familiar, it won a Best Short award at SXSW in 2009. Usually the films play Sundance first, then SXSW ... nice to see Austin got a film first this time.
• Dallas filmmaker Clay Liford's short comedy My Mom Smokes Weed is also in the Sundance shorts lineup. Great title. Liford's latest feature, Earthling, was a recent "In Progress" screening at Austin Film Society. Liford also worked as cinematographer on David Lowery's film St. Nick. I feel like we've come full circle.

[Photo credit: "Bryan Poyser" by Carol Epstein. Found on Flickr, used with permission.]