South Korean actress Lee Eun-ju, star of one of the country's highest grossing films, has been found dead after an apparent suicide in Seoul. The 25-year-old, known for her role in hit film Taegukgi, or National Flag, was found hanged in her dressing room, BBC reports.

Miramax Films is likely to release as many as 22 movies in the next seven months as co-chairmen Harvey and Bob Weinstein prepare to leave the company, including several pictures that had been shelved or whose release dates had been repeatedly delayed, executives at the studio say. Sharon Waxman and David M. Halbfinger report in the New York Times (free subscription required to view).

The scars of genocide, the reality of AIDS, a talking donkey and a transvestite mortician -- just some of the images of Africa being offered to movie fans at the continent's top film festival which starts this week. Fespaco, the biennial pan-African festival of film and television, kicks off on Saturday in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, transforming the dusty, moped-jammed city into the Cannes of Africa for eight days. James Knight and Katrina Manson report for Reuters.

Director Tsai Ming-liang says he won't release his award-winning film "The Wayward Cloud" in his native Taiwan if the island's censors insist on cutting any of its sexually explicit scenes, the Associated Press reports.

In The New York Times, Sharon Waxman and David Halbfinger look further at the end of Miramax:

Miramax Films is likely to release as many as 22 movies in the next seven months as co-chairmen Harvey and Bob Weinstein prepare to leave the company, including several pictures that had been shelved or whose release dates had been repeatedly delayed, executives at the studio say.

The large number of expected releases is a 180-degree turn for Miramax, which had scaled back operations amid employee layoffs over the last six months. It is an attempt, as one company executive put it, to "clean the pipeline" before its corporate parent, the Walt Disney Company, puts the unit in the hands of new managers.

Harvey Weinstein, the Miramax Films co-founder, is expected to meet this week with executives for the Walt Disney Company for a final round of negotiations that would allow the Weinsteins to leave Disney when their contract expires in September, according to three people involved in the negotiations. The Weinsteins have agreed to stay and market several Miramax movies that have already been completed and will be released before they depart on Sept. 30. Laura M. Holson reports for the New York Times (free subscription required to view).

Roman Catholic organisations in India have demanded the withdrawal of a film that depicts a priest having an affair with a girl half his age. Indian television channels are now refusing to run the promotional material for the film, Sins, ahead of its release on Friday. The director of the film, Vinod Pande, says the movie is not offensive and has refused to withdraw it, BBC reports.

GERMAN HOME ENTERTAINMENT RIGHTS TO I ON NEW MEDIA

MSP Productions today announced the sale of German home entertainment distribution rights to I ON New Media, the Warner Bros. German distribution outlet.

After teasing local movie buffs for the past week with the announcement of the historic docu-drama Guiana 1838 as it’s Opening film, organizers of the Belize International Film Festival have finally released the names of the films selected to participate in the Third Edition of the Festival set for Feb. 21 – 28, 2005 at the Bliss Center for Performing Arts in Belize City.  

Curated by Gina Kim and is co-presented with the Film and Video Center
at University of California, Irvine.

Guests:    * Director  Im Kwon-taek in person  March 4 and 5.
       Director Kim Dong-won in person March 21.
       Director  E J-Yong in Person April 18.

-Official Call for Film Submissions-
The CineVegas Film Festival announced that Dennis Hopper will serve again as Chairman of the Creative Advisory Board in 2005. In addition, they have begun accepting film submissions, and will continue to do so through April 8, 2005.

Last week you would have passed her in the street. Next week British actress Sophie Okonedo will be heading up the red carpet hoping for an Oscar. It's all a long way from selling clothes at Portobello Market. The Guardian speaks with the actress.

Sandra Dee, who at the height of her fame in the 1960s was arguably the biggest female teen idol of her time, has died, leaving a legacy of film roles that includes "Gidget" and "Tammy and the Doctor." Laura Wides remembers the actress in the A.P.

Pinot noir, the relatively obscure red wine beloved by the movie's snobby but sweet character Miles, has been experiencing a gentle upswing in popularity for some years. But the numbers jumped sharply after "Sideways" opened last fall, according to supermarket, drug and liquor store sales data from ACNielsen. Michelle Locke reports to A.P.

Frank Ostini can't seem to keep his cocktail napkins in stock. The owner of the Hitching Post II restaurant, featured in the Oscar-nominated film "Sideways," is on pace to blow through a three-year supply of 50,000 in the next few months. Customers, it appears, are plucking napkins as souvenirs. Greg Risling reports for A.P.

Jonathan Curiel profiles Gurinder Chadha's "Bride & Prejudice" in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Organizers of the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma de Montréal, set for October, have confirmed that they plan to go ahead with their festival, despite the resignation of board chairman Daniel Langlois.

The Montreal fest scene has faced considerable upheaval lately, with the recent announcement of a new fest to he headed by Moritz De Hadelyn and last year's withdrawing of funds from the Montreal World Film Festival by government agencies. Last week, organizers of the new Quebec fest, Le Festival International de Films de Montreal (Oct 12 - 23) announced dates that would coincide with the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (Oct 13 - 23) and told indieWIRE that the two festivals would work together.

Now that partnership is off, according to a statement from Festival du Nouveau Cinéma organizers yesterday. The statement, translated from French, cited different visions and the concurrent dates saying, "no collaboration is possible for the moment." The 33 year old Festival du Nouveau Cinéma said that director and founder Claude Chamberlan will continue to lead the festival and announced new partners and collaborators soon.

"American Beauty" director Sam Mendes is to be honored with a lifetime achievement award from the Directors Guild of Great Britain, BBC reports.

Two investors have sued a filmmaker for allegedly misleading them about plans for a documentary on the life of presidential candidate John Kerry, the Associated Press reports.

As Mr. Weinstein and Miramax prepare to go their separate ways - the Walt Disney Company, which now owns the company, has said it does not plan to renew the contract of Mr. Weinstein and his brother, Bob, to run the unit - more than a few power players in Hollywood have been tallying up their debt to a 52-year-old entrepreneur who often started them in the business, and sent many on their way with lessons that did not always come easy. Sharon Waxman reports in the New York Times (free subscription required to view).

A retrospective of the works of Oscar-winning U.S. filmmaker Errol Morris will highlight the 12th annual Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival (April 22-May 1), organizers said Monday. Etan Vlessing reports in the Hollywood Reporter.

French film siren Catherine Deneuve believes her career would have ended long ago had she tried to work in Hollywood, where youth and looks count for almost everything. Mike Collett-White reports in Reuters.

A delightful German-Spanish comedy that lampoons Europe's language barriers against the unifying backdrop of soccer and crime gave the Berlin Film Festival a badly needed lift on Saturday. Erik Kirschbaum reports in Reuters.

A film about young Colombians swept up in deadly paramilitary battles in a Medellin neighborhood won a grand jury prize for best documentary Saturday at the Miami International Film Festival. The Associated Press reports.

"Thirty-nine years after the film first appeared, only one of those parents survives, but this document of youthful confusion has not aged one minute," A.O. Scott takes a look at Jean-Luc Godard's "Masculine Feminine" in the New York Times (free subscription required to view).

Period epic Man to Man has opened the Berlin Film Festival to a lukewarm response, amid criticism that it failed to tackle the issue of racism. The Anglo-French historical adventure, starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Joseph Fiennes, received scattered boos from an audience of critics. BBC reports.

The Museum of the Moving Image will add new galleries, an outdoor theater, an educational center and a new collection storage facility as part of a $25 million renovation and expansion of its Queens site, museum officials announced Thursday. Deepti Hajela reports for A.P.

Film and television studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer said Thursday that chief financial officer Daniel Taylor will become president after the sale of the company to a consortium led by Sony Corp. A.P. reports.

Top grossing porn "Deep Throat" is to be released in the U.S. to coincide with the opening of "Inside Deep Throat," which explores the story behind the infamous '70s film, according to BBC.

Miramax Films has paid about $10 million for rights to "Mrs. Henderson Presents," British director Stephen Frears' period film about an eccentric widow, played by Judi Dench. Gregg Kilday and Anne Thompson report in the Hollywood Reporter.

Hotel Rwanda has picked up three nominations for this year's Academy Awards including best actor for Don Cheadle and best supporting actress for Britain's Sophie Okonedo. Based on real events, it tells the story of how one man saved more than 1,200 Rwandan refugees at the height of tribal conflict between the Hutus and the Tutsis in 1994. BBC profiles the real Paul Rusesabagina.

"Bride and Prejudice," a new film by the director of the hit "Bend It Like Beckham," tries to speak to a global audience by refracting an iconic English novel through the prism of the Indian diaspora. The movie by director Gurinder Chadha takes novelist Jane Austen's 1813 classic "Pride and Prejudice" and sets it in contemporary small-town India. Paul Eckert reports for Reuters.

Film producer Brian Grazer says he first heard about the 1972 pornographic film "Deep Throat" when his 60-year-old grandmother went to see it. Grazer, whose credits include "Splash," "Apollo 13" and "A Beautiful Mind," said he made the new documentary "Inside Deep Throat" to examine why his grandmother was drawn to the 70s film. The Associated Press reports.

In the March 2005 issue of Vanity Fair:

Sure, it's who you know in the movie business, but it's also what you know. Our picks for the best entertainment web sites...

indiewire.com: An award-winning site covering the independent-movie scene like no other. It offers in-depth coverage of upcoming releases and festivals, and exclusive interviews with actors and directors."

We're hoping this will somehow get us an invite to the Vanity Fair Oscar party...

At a crowded Apple Store in Soho on Thursday, Killer Films partners Christine Vachon and Pam Koffler talk about independent film and technology.
[Photo by Brian Brooks/indieWIRE]

"Can't US film-makers think about anything other than sex?" asks B Ruby Rich in a report from "a frustrating Sundance festival", published in The Guardian:

The Sundance film festival increasingly acts like the magical mirror in the Harry Potter series: a shiny surface that shows you what you want to see. It's a brass ring grabbed by twentysomething boys on the trail of an agent or a two-picture deal. It is Main Street, USA for celebrity-seekers, who know that there, this year, everyone from Snoop Dogg to Paris Hilton to Glenn Close could be spotted. To cynics, it is a branding opportunity where corporate America seeks hipness by association. Volkswagen cars ferried film-makers, Hewlett-Packard computers served journalists, Intel wi-fi hotspots were there for everybody, and select VIPs were given Sundance Channel gift bags fitted out with iPods.

On Movie City News,Emanuel Levy looks at Sundance '05:

Let's assume that the only source of information about American indies is Sundance's premier section, the Dramatic Competition - excluding world premieres, American Spectrum, Frontier and other series that exhibit new films. What kind of conclusions can be draw about prevalent trends in paradigms, themes, and styles? What's the state of the art of American indies as of 2005? How innovative, not to mention experimental or avant-garde, was this year's Dramatic Competition?

It is a valid question, considering that Sundance has been the Mecca for new American indies over the past 25 years. It is easier to define the prevailing trends of this year's Dramatic Competition by what they avoided than by what they actually accomplished.

In a New Yorker article, entitled "Gross Points - Is the blockbuster the end of cinema?", Louis Menand explores big movies:

The history of Hollywood is a comic routine of bad guesses, unintended outcomes and pure luck. Half of the failures were well-intentioned, and half of the successes were, by ordinary standards of fairness and decency, undeserved. People do get rich making movies, more often than not, they’re the wrong people That’s why moviemaking is so much fun to read about. Unless, of course, it’s your money.

After a weekend course in documentary film-making, Salam Pax took to the streets of war-ravaged Iraq. His first movie, "Baghdad Blogger — Video Reports from Iraq," reveals an emotional cocktail of resentment over the U.S. occupation and joy at the removal of Saddam Hussein It is among several movies — including Iraq's first feature-length drama since Saddam's fall and a raw documentary on American troops fighting insurgents — to emerge from Iraq's chaos being showcased at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam, one of the world's largest gatherings for independent filmmakers. Anthony Deutsch reports for A.P.