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Keep up with the always-hopping film festival world with our weekly Film Festival Roundup column. Check out last week’s Roundup right here.

Lineup Announcements

– The 2017 Sun Valley Film Festival (Svff), presented by Zions Bank, has announced its film line-up for the weekend of March 15 – 19. Now in its sixth year, Svff offers five days of 30 feature film screenings, including 5 world premieres and featuring 16 documentaries and 14 narrative features.

The festival will open with the World Premiere documentary “Blood Road” starring Sun Valley local Rebecca Rusch on March 15 and close with the documentary “Big Sonia” on March 19. Additional film highlights include “The Hero,” starring Sam Elliott, Laura Prepon, Krysten Ritter and Nick Offerman, “Custody” with Viola Davis, Hayden Panettiere, Ellen Burstyn and Tony Shalhoub, and “Dina,” winner of the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at Sundance. The film slate can also be viewed here.

– Suncoast Credit Union Gasparilla International Film Festival...

A slender glimpse into Latin American history through the eyes of an unlikely participant, Andrea Kalin's First Lady of the Revolution introduces Henrietta Boggs, an Alabama woman who married Jose Figueres shortly before he started on his path to being one of Costa Rica's most important figures. Most appropriate for screening in museum or educational settings, the doc does showcase a woman whose adventurous nature was out of step with early 20th-century conventions.

Boggs was born in 1918 and grew up in very conservative Alabama society. To hear her tell it (her sharpness on camera belies her age), she was...

On a picture perfect fall day two days before the 2014 Woodstock Film Festival awards ceremony, I sat down with Meira Blaustein, co-founder and Executive Director of the Festival.

Meira Blaustein: “It’s very easy to meet people here at the Festival; it’s casual, and friendly, yet high quality. One can have conversations with those who can potentially buy your film, buy your next film, challenge your creativity and elevate your creativity and push the envelope. The goal of the Festival is to bring together outstanding, thought-provoking, and passionate films. This year we have twenty-two world premieres. We have filmmakers from all over the world. I’m proud we have a spotlight on women in film; eight narratives directed by women is unique -- unfortunately it is unique but it is. These women are smart, talented and strong, and their films are powerful. We have a lineup that dares to ask questions, and dares to be bold. It’s important to put together a tapestry that is reflective of the current state of filmmaking and a reflection of the current state of what is happening in film.”

The Woodstock Film Festival Award Winners

The Maverick Award for Best Feature Narrative: "Patrick's Day," directed by Terry McMahon

The Maverick Award for Best Feature Documentary: "Red Lines," directed by Andrea Kalin and Oliver Lukacs.

The Maverick Award for Best Animation: "My Kingdom," directed by Debra Solomon

The Diane Seligman Award for Best Short Narrative: "Sunday," directed by Iva Gocheva

The Diane Seligman Award for Best Student Short Film: "So You've Grown Attached,"directed by Kate Tsang

The Diane Seligman Award for Best Short Documentary: "Our Course" (Nasza Klatwa), directed by Tomasz Sliwinski

The Haskell Wexler Award for Best Cinematography: "Patrick's Day," directed by Terry McMahon with cinematography by Michael Lavelle

James Lyons Award for Best Editing of a Feature Narrative:

"Patrick's Day," directed by Terry McMahon and edited by Emer Reynolds

James Lyons Award for Best Editing of a Feature Documentary:

"Killswitch," directed by Ali Akbarzadeh and edited by Prichard Smith

Ultra Indie Award "Uncertain Terms," directed by Nathan Silver

Tangerine Entertainment Juice Award For Best Female Feature Director: Caryn Waechter, director of "The Sisterhood of Night"

For more information about the Woodstock Film Festival:

http://www.woodstockfilmfestival.com/

Award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker, Susan Kouguell teaches screenwriting at Purchase College Suny, and presents international seminars on screenwriting and film. Author of Savvy Characters Sell Screenplays! and The Savvy Screenwriter, she is chairperson of Su-City Pictures East, LLC, a consulting company founded in 1990 where she works with writers, filmmakers, and executives worldwide.www.su-city-pictures.com, http://su-city-pictures.com/wpblog...

When the Ukrainian crisis erupted, and Russia started letting its old Cold War freak flag fly again, the effects were felt beyond the borders of Eastern Europe, and the unwitting side effect was that it sweeped another pending humanitarian crises right off the front page of the Western world’s newspapers. The problems in Syria haven’t gone away in the last few months, and are just as bad as ever. While world leaders struggle to find diplomatic and political solutions, hundreds of people continue to die, thousands continue to be wounded or displaced, and millions remain in refugee camps, living in a kind of limbo. What can two people do in all this madness?

The answer, it turns out, is quite a bit. Red Lines, named after the term frequently bandied about by President Barack Obama as the point at which foreign military intervention in Syria would be inevitable,...

The 2010 Writers Guild of America Awards Winners The Writers Guild of America, East (Wgae) and the Writers Guild of America, West (Wgaw) tonight announced the winners of the 2010 Writers Guild Awards for outstanding achievement in writing for screen, television, radio, news, promotional, and videogame writing at simultaneous ceremonies at the Hudson Theatre at the Millennium Broadway Hotel in New York City and the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. Susie Essman of Curb Your Enthusiasm hosted the East Coast show, which was executive produced by Craig Shemin, who was also the head writer. Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy) hosted the West Coast show, which was executive produced by Spike Jones, Jr.

The Writers Guild of America, East presented special honors to: Alan Zweibel - Ian McLellan Hunter Lifetime Achievement Award; Gary David Goldberg - Herb Sargent Award for Comedy Excellence; Edward Albee - Evelyn F. Burkey Award for contributions...

As hard as it may be to believe sometimes, someone (or someones) actually sits down and writes a movie or TV show before you end up seeing it at your local multiplex or on your favorite TV network. The people who do the sitting and the writing are, surprisingly, called writers and, like the Directors, the Golden Globes and the Oscars, they have their own awards show.

This week, the Writers Guild of America, which is the trade group and advocate for writers, announced its nominations for outstanding achievement in feature film and television, radio, news, promotional writing, and graphic animation during the 2009 season to be honored at the upcoming 2010 Writers Guild Awards on February 20, 2010, in Los Angeles and New York.

We realize that these nominations may not be as glamorous as the Golden Globes or the Oscars, but we kinda like writers around here and think they do a pretty important job.

It’s mid-December and that can only mean one thing: awards season. Today, the WGA announced their TV nominations (feature nominations will be announced Jan. 11th) and it’s the usual suspects for the most part with a couple of surprises. Mad Men, 30 Rock, The Office, and newcomer Modern Family earned 3 nominations each. Meanwhile, popular fan favorite Glee received two. There are a lot of categories and nominees so I’m just going to mention the two big awards before the jump.

The nominees for Best Drama Series are: Breaking Bad, Dexter, Friday Night Lights, Lost, and Mad Men. The nominees for Best Comedy Series are: 30 Rock, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Glee, Modern Family, and The Office.

The WGA will announce the winners on Feb. 20th. Hit the jump to see the full list of nominees.

Drama Series

“Breaking Bad” - Written by Sam Catlin, Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould, George Mastras,...

Awards heavyweights "Mad Men," "30 Rock" and "The Office" and buzzed-about newcomer "Modern Family" led the TV field for the 2010 Writers Guild Awards with three nominations each.

AMC's "Mad Men" and NBC's "30 Rock" and "The Office" are in the running for best drama/comedy series, and each received two nominations for episodic writing. "Family" made the cut for best comedy series, best new series and best episodic writing for a comedy series.

ABC's "Family" was one of two new shows to break into the best series categories along with Fox's quirky high-school dramedy "Glee," which faces "Family" in the best comedy series and best new series fields.

While the WGA Awards are still in its nomination phase, Fox's "The Simpsons" can already uncork the champagne. The veteran series is assured to win the animation category after landing all five nomination slots.

The biggest surprise among the series nominees was HBO's low-key baseball comedy "Eastbound & Down,...

For those itching to see a Muslim-themed variation on The Original Kings Of Comedy, please enjoy Allah Made Me Funny, Andrea Kalin's document of a comedy tour featuring three Muslim comics: the laid-back suburbanite Mohammed Amer; the boisterous, bushy-haired Chicagoan Azhar Usman; and the lightly politicized Black Muslim Bryant "Preacher" Moss. Kalin assembles a few sequences that feature the comedians at home, talking about their daily lives and their decisions to go into show business, but the bulk of Allah Made Me Funny has been shot at a single concert, with each comic delivering their 20-minute sets to an appreciative audience. There's not much that's notable about the movie from a cinematic or documentary perspective; its success is wholly dictated by the quality of the acts, which by and large are neither awful nor hilarious. Each comedian does deliver some funny, reasonably unique material about being Muslim in America.

By Neil Pedley

At the multiplex this week, we have some pre-Halloween gothic fancy, films about the two things guaranteed to start a fight in any elevator . religion and politics . and a little music from Nick and Norah and Jonathan Demme's infinite playlists.

"Allah Made Me Funny"

When Albert Brooks went looking for comedy in the Muslim world, he perhaps didn't consider that it was alive and well inside our shores. Filmmaker Andrea Kalin picked up her camera and hit the road with Muslim American stand-up comics Azhar Usman, Mo Amer and Preacher Moss, who started the tour in 2004 to combat the negative stereotypes associated with their faith by sharing their unique brand of humor. The film intersperses their routines with personal vignettes that show how the comedians employ laughter as a tool of information to entertain, to educate and to show that a good mother-in-law gag simply knows no boundaries.