Michael Newport

I.F. -- Being friends with Ryan takes a lot of imagination

Trailer for Case 219, which screened at the Newport Beach Film Festival 2010. Through the eyes of a Los Angeles Times journalist, the story of a high school shooting rampage unfolds in a series of tense and suspenseful documentary style interviews. Case 219 penetrates the everyday lives of the shooter s best friends and family in the pursuit of learning what triggered the violent acts. These provocative and haunting interviews leave the audience with the dilemma of who is really to blame. Film is based on Walter Dean Myers' novel Shooter. Walter Dean Myers is a New York Times bestselling author of more than 85 books for children and young adults. His award-winning body of work includes Sunrise Over Fallujah, Fallen Angels and Monster. He has received two Newbery Honors and five Coretta Scott King Awards. He is the winner of the first Michael L. Printz Award as well as the first recipient of Kent State University's Virginia Hamilton Literary Award.

If -- 'Last Visit' ( ltima visita) explores grief, memory and closure after a man's partner is killed in a car accident.

Evening unites a stellar cast, and is based on the beloved novel by Susan Minot and adapted for the screen by Ms. Minot and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham, under the direction of Lajos Koltai, who was previously an Academy Award-nominated cinematographer. Evening is a deeply emotional film that illuminates the timeless love which binds mother and daughter seen through the prism of one mother s life as it crests with optimism, navigates a turning point, and ebbs to its close. Two pairs of real-life mothers and daughters Vanessa Redgrave and Natasha Richardson, and Meryl Streep and Mamie Gummer portray, respectively, a mother and her daughter and the mother s best friend at different stages in life. Overcome by the power of memory, Ann Lord (Ms. Redgrave) reveals a long-held secret to her concerned daughters; Constance (Ms. Richardson), a content wife and mother, and Nina (Toni Collette), a restless single woman. Both are bedside when Ann calls out for the man she loved more than any other. But who is this 'Harris,' wonder her daughters, and what is he to our mother? While Constance and Nina try to take stock of Ann s life and their own lives, their mother is tended to by a night nurse (Eileen Atkins) as she journeys in her mind back to a summer weekend some fifty years ago, when she was Ann Grant (Claire Danes)... ...a young woman who has come from New York City to be maid of honor at the high-society Newport wedding of her dearest friend from college, Lila Wittenborn (Ms. Gummer). The bride-to-be is jittery, and turns to her maid of honor rather than her own mother (Glenn Close) for support. Ann stays close to her friend, yet is even closer to Lila s irrepressible brother Buddy (Hugh Dancy). Unexpected feelings surge forth once Ann meets wedding guest Harris Arden (Patrick Wilson), a lifelong friend and intimate of the Wittenborn family. Ann s love for Harris will change her life, and those of her daughters, forever.