Every week, I get several press releases, screening invitations and other notifications from a handful of studio contacts. While I won’t be sharing any information regarding my screening invites, some of the press releases might be of interest to my readers, so I thought I’d start sharing them in toto with all of you. These could include new image galleries for various films or important updates to upcoming releases from various smaller studios and art house production companies.

• Press Release: Anchor Bay Acquires North American Rights to ‘Excision’
• Press Release: Go Digital Acquires ‘Unraveled’
• Press Release: ‘The Island President’ Finds Its Subject in the News
• Press Release: 9th Annual Irish Film & Television Awards

Press Release: Anchor Bay Acquires North American Rights to ‘Excision’

ANCHOR BAY FILMS ACQUIRES RICHARD BATES, JR.’S EXCISION FOR NORTH AMERICAN RIGHTS

The Horror Film Stars AnnaLynne McCord, Traci Lords, Ariel Winter, Roger Bart, Malcolm McDowell, Marlee Matlin & John Waters

BEVERLY HILLS, CA – Anchor Bay Films announced today the acquisition of all North American distribution rights to director/writer Richard Bates, Jr.’s debut feature film, EXCISION, which made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival last month. Produced by Dylan Hale Lewis, the horror film features an all-star cast including: AnnaLynne McCord (“90210”), Traci Lords (Cry Baby), Ariel Winter (“Modern Family”), Roger Bart (“Desperate Housewives”), Jeremy Sumpter (Soul Surfer), Malcolm McDowell, Matthew Gray Gubler (“Criminal Minds”), Academy Award® winner Marlee Matlin (Children of a Lesser God), Ray Wise (Good Night, and Good Luck) and John Waters. The deal was announced by Bill Clark, President of Anchor Bay Entertainment.

“We are pleased to be adding EXCISION to our slate this year,” commented Kevin Kasha, Executive Vice President, Acquisitions and Co-Productions for Anchor Bay Films. “It has an amazing cast and we know Anchor Bay fans will love it!”

“I have been influenced my entire life by the films which Anchor Bay has brought to audiences. I could not be more excited that they have chosen to take my film out in North America,” said Bates.

EXCISION is the story of Pauline (McCord), a delusional teenage outcast. Pauline picks scabs. Pauline dissects road kill. Pauline fantasizes about performing surgery on strangers. Her fascinations disturb her schoolmates and her parents, Phyllis (Lords) and Bob (Bart). No one understands Pauline except for Grace (Winter), her younger sister who suffers from cystic fibrosis. An outcast at school and at home, Pauline is convinced that the best way to repair her estranged relationship with her family is to perform a risky operation to save her sister’s life. A BXR Productions film, EXCISION is Richard Bates, Jr.’s directorial debut adapted from his award-winning short film, also called Excision.

The deal was negotiated by Kevin Kasha, Josh Thomashow and Marc Barson for Anchor Bay Films; Kevin Iwashina and Christine D’Souza of Preferred Content, Cassian Elwes, and Elsa Ramo of The Law Offices of Elsa Ramo negotiated the deal on behalf of the filmmakers.

About Anchor Bay Films
Anchor Bay Films is unique in that it offers the creative community a fully integrated distribution capability on all platforms and an international solution extending beyond the U.S. Anchor Bay Films is a division of Anchor Bay Entertainment and is on the ground providing quality distribution with operations in the U.S., United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, as well as distribution capabilities in other key territories. The company focuses on a platform release strategy for its films with an eye toward maximizing their potential across all ancillary distribution platforms. Films in its library include the critically-acclaimed comedy City Island starring Andy Garcia and Solitary Man starring Michael Douglas as well as the 2011 releases of Kill the Irishman starring Ray Stevenson, Vincent D’Onofrio, Val Kilmer and Christopher Walken, Toronto Film Festival award-winner Beautiful Boy with Maria Bello and Michael Sheen and Cannes 2011 premiere Corman’s World. Anchor Bay Entertainment is a subsidiary of Starz Media, LLC (www.starzmedia.com) which is an operating unit of Starz, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Liberty Media Corporation.

Press Release: Go Digital Acquires ‘Unraveled’

GO DIGITAL ACQUIRES MARC H. SIMON’S UNRAVELED

Marc Dreier documentary will be released on VOD and in theaters on April 13th, 2012

New York (February 8, 2012) – Go Digital has acquired U.S. rights to Marc H. Simon’s feature documentary UNRAVELED, about disgraced attorney and philanthropist, Marc Dreier, and will be releasing it day-and date on VOD and in theaters on April 13, 2012. Additionally, Showtime and CNBC have acquired TV rights to the film. UNRAVELED was produced by Simon, Matthew Makar of Elementary Films, Steven Cantor of Stick Figure Productions and Miranda Bailey of Ambush Entertainment.

UNRAVELED premiered in the U.S. at the 2011 Los Angeles Film Festival and also played at Hot Docs, IDFA, Nantucket Film Festival, and Doc NYC, among many others. This is Simon’s third film, he previously wrote, directed and produced NURSERY UNIVERSITY and wrote and produced AFTER INNOCENCE.

Just days before Bernard Madoff captured headlines as the largest Ponzi schemer in U.S. history, Marc Dreier, a prominent Manhattan attorney, was arrested for orchestrating a massive fraud scheme that netted hundreds of millions of dollars from hedge funds. Brazen forgeries and impersonations branded the white-collar crime spree remarkable. UNRAVELED is set in the “purgatory” of house arrest – – an upper East Side penthouse — where the Court has ordered Dreier confined until his sentencing day. The film weaves Dreier’s struggle to prepare for the possibility of life imprisonment with first-person flashbacks, which reveal his audacious path of destruction. Destroyed by his own hubris, Dreier attempts to grasp his tragic unraveling. With unprecedented access, UNRAVELED exposes a portrait of a man who achieved the distinction he so desperately craved, but not for his keen intellect or ambition, but rather as a “mastermind of criminal deception.”

Simon said: “When these massive financial crimes are uncovered, the public is deeply curious about how the perpetrators, often highly intelligent and respected individuals in their communities, are capable of risking everything good in their lives for material or other superficial gain. I had this very unique opportunity to delve into the complexities of one of the most notorious white collar criminals in history, and audiences have been fascinated by Dreier’s revelations. I am thrilled for this distribution team to take this cautionary tale to the masses.”

Press Release: ‘The Island President’ Finds Its Subject in the News

Word from the Filmmakers:
Yesterday morning we woke up to the shocking news that President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives had resigned his office under duress. According to news reports and local sources, Nasheed faced the choice of using the military to quell a violent demonstration or stepping down to avoid bloodshed. In line with his long history of peaceful activism, he chose the latter. We have heard from eyewitnesses that Nasheed was initially being held under military arrest at the Presidential residence in Malé, the capital. We were told that before Nasheed stepped down, demonstrators loyal to former dictator, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, stood outside the President’s office shouting “Gayoom! Gayoom!” In addition to forcing his ouster, demonstrators stormed the national television station, detained journalists and replaced independent programming with that of the station run by Gayoom’s allies. It was reported to us, that last night the streets of Malé were eerily quiet with a military curfew imposed on the capital. Today, Nasheed spoke at a rally for the Maldivian Democratic Party and then led a peaceful march on the streets of the capital. The protesters were met by police in camouflage, with helmets, truncheons and tear gas. Many injuries are being reported.

As filmmakers who spent two years off and on with President Nasheed while making “The Island President” we witnessed a leader committed to transparent governance, multi-party democracy, and the struggle for human rights. This struggle includes his leadership in the fight against climate change that so threatens the Maldives and the rest of us. This is not the first time that Nasheed has suffered a political setback in his fight for justice in the Maldives. We expect this is just the next chapter. We are deeply concerned for Nasheed’s safety, we stand in solidarity with him and hope others will join us.

– Jon Shenk (Director), Bonni Cohen (Producer), Richard Berge (Producer)

The New York Times: The Opinion Pages

The Dregs of Dictatorship

By MOHAMED NASHEED

Published: February 8, 2012

Male, Maldives

DICTATORSHIPS don’t always die when the dictator leaves office. The wave of revolutions that toppled autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen last year was certainly cause for hope. But the people of those countries should be aware that, long after the revolutions, powerful networks of regime loyalists can remain behind and can attempt to strangle their nascent democracies.

I learned this lesson quickly. My country, the Maldives, voted out President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, its iron-fisted ruler, back in 2008, in historic elections that swept away three decades of his authoritarian rule. And yet the dictatorship bequeathed to the infant democracy a looted treasury, a ballooning budget deficit and a rotten judiciary.

I was elected that year, and with the help of the International Monetary Fund, my government worked to cut the deficit, while also building a modern tax base. For the first time in its history, the Maldives — a group of islands in the Indian Ocean — had a democratically elected president, parliament and local councils.

But it also had a judiciary handpicked by the former president, which was now hiding behind a democratic constitution. These powerful judges provided protection for the former president, his family members and political allies, many of whom are accused of corruption, embezzlement and human rights crimes.

At the same time, new laws guaranteeing freedom of speech were abused by a new force in Maldivian politics: Islamic extremists. The former president’s cabinet members threw anti-Semitic and anti-Christian slurs at my government, branding as apostates anyone who tried to defend the country’s liberal Islamic traditions and claiming that democracy granted them and their allies license to call for violent jihad and indulge in hate speech.

In response to these issues, my government asked the United Nations to help us investigate judicial abuses and ordered the arrest of Abdulla Mohamed, the chief judge of the criminal court, on charges of protecting the former president and corrupting the judicial system. However, in a dramatic turn of events on Tuesday, the former president’s supporters protested in the streets, and police officers and army personnel loyal to the old government mutinied and forced me, at gunpoint, to resign. To avoid bloodshed, I did so. I believe this to be a coup d’état and suspect that my vice president, who has since been sworn into office, helped to plan it.

Choosing to stand up to the judge was a controversial decision, but I feel I had no choice but to do what I did — to have taken no action, and passively watched the country’s democracy strangled, would have been the greatest injustice of all.

The problems we are facing in the Maldives are a warning for other Muslim nations undergoing democratic reform. At times, dealing with the corrupt system of patronage the former regime left behind can feel like wrestling with a Hydra: when you remove one head, two more grow back. With patience and determination, the beast can be slain. But let the Maldives be a lesson for aspiring democrats everywhere: the dictator can be removed in a day, but it can take years to stamp out the lingering remnants of his dictatorship.

Mohamed Nasheed was president of the Maldives from 2008 until Feb. 7.

Press Release: 9th Annual Irish Film & Television Awards

IRISH FILM & TELEVISION AWARDS – ALL EYES ON THE EMERALD ISLE – 11th February 2012

Michael Fassbender, Brendan Gleeson, Chris O’Dowd, Dana Delany, AJ Buckley, Armand Assante, Stephen Rea, Brenda Fricker, Maria Doyle Kennedy and more at the Irish Film & Television Awards

(Dublin Ireland) – February 10, 2012

Ireland’s finest screen creative talent descend this weekend on Dublin, Saturday 11th of February 2012, for the 9th Annual Irish Film & Television Awards celebrations, taking place at the spectacular Convention Centre Dublin (CCD).

The President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins leads the celebrations, showcasing Ireland’s screen talent with IFTA Awards presented in categories across film and television. IFTA 2012 will see Ireland’s directors, writers, actors, craftspeople and television programme makers in attendance.

Guests scheduled to attend include Brendan Gleeson (The Guard), Michael Fassbender (Shame), Chris O’Dowd (Bridesmaids), Brenda Fricker (Albert Nobbs), Brían F. O’Byrne (Mildred Pierce, Prime Suspect), Stephen Rea (Underworld Awakening), Ruth Negga (Shirley, Misfits), Maria Doyle Kennedy (The Tudors, Albert Nobbs), Liam Cunningham (The Guard), Emmett J. Scanlan (Charlie Casanova), Amy Huberman (Threesome, Stella Days), Brendan O’Carroll (Mrs Brown’s Boys), Antonia Campbell Hughes (Lead Balloon), Colin Morgan (Merlin), Martin McCann (The Pacific), Charlene McKenna (RAW), Olivia Tracey (Agnes Browne), Allen Leech (Downton Abbey), Pat Shortt (Garage), Marcella Plunkett (Stella Days), Bronagh Gallagher (Albert Nobbs).

Veteran Irish actress Fionnula Flanagan (Some Mother’s Son, The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, LOST) is to receive Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Academy on the night and international guests presenting top Awards include Dana Delany (Desperate Housewives), Armand Assante (Gotti) and AJ Buckley (CSI NY).

Hosted by Simon Delaney (The Good Wife) the Irish Film & Television Awards show will broadcast primetime on Irish television RTÉ One at 9.40pm GMT.

Speaking ahead of the 9th Annual Irish Film & Television Awards this weekend, IFTA Chief Executive Áine Moriarty said:

“Despite economic setbacks, Ireland can be proud of its creative talent who continue to deliver world class production, entertaining audiences both at home and around the world. The 9th Annual Irish Film & Television Awards promises to be a terrific evening of entertainment for the viewers at home, and a very special night of celebration for the 2012 nominees and Ireland’s film and television industry.”