Sundance adds section devoted to low-budget films

Los Angeles: The next edition of the Sundance Film Festival, running January 21-31 in Park City, Utah, will introduce a new section, Next, which will feature six to eight films from the world of low- and no-budget filmmaking.Festival director John Cooper said the section is designed to discover and promote filmmakers who are finding new ways to tell stories on limited budgets.

Lynn Shelton`s "Humpday," which exemplifies the new wave of low-budget filmmaking, proved one of the breakout films of this past January`s Sundance, where it earned a special jury prize. "The filmmakers who are working in this realm and who I have spoken to about this have a `creative impatience` that I find invigorating," Cooper said. "These are not just the films that have been labeled mumblecore ... or Dogma or even guerilla. They are an emerging counterculture within our counterculture." Cooper continued, "We want filmmakers to feel encouraged and intrigued by this new section of the festival. We hope to excite audiences as well as inform a budding industry already investing in new models of distribution." As of Tuesday, the 2010 edition of the fest had received nearly 5,000 applications and more than 3,600 films. Submission information is available at www.sundance.org/submissions. Bureau Report