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Read More: Meet the 2015 Sundance Filmmakers #84: Samba Gadjigo Takes on the Fascinating Life of African Filmmaker Ousmane Sembene Kino Lorber has acquired North American distribution rights to "Sembene!," a documentary on the life and legacy of film director, producer and writer Ousmane Sembene. The film first premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and the deal comes ahead of its international premiere in the Official Selection of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival Directed by Sembene-biographer Samba Gadjigo ("Ousmane Sembene: The Making of a Militant Artist") and award-winning producer Jason Silverman ("Olympia"), the film tells the true story of the self-taught novelist and filmmaker who fought, against enormous odds, a 50-year battle to give Africans the power to tell their own stories. Told through never-before-seen archival footage, the documentary tracks Sembene's journey from manual laborer to the "Father of...

Andrew Bujalski's one of the most distinctive directors of drama to emerge in the last decade. The elements that define his work are instantly recognizable: the abrupt starts and stops (those words seem more appropriate in regard to his movies than "beginnings" and "endings") and his instistence on not offering resolutions at the end of his films; the careful interplay of details that mark both his characterization and his framing; and the nuanced, often beautiful images he creates with his regular cinematographer, Matthias Grunsky. Frankly, he's got more in common with Mike Leigh and recent Patrice Chereau than with his friend Joe Swanberg.

Bujalski's first two features were the naturalistic miniature Funny Ha Ha and the bleak, ambiguous Mutual Appreciation. His newest film, Beeswax, can be seen as an application of the lessons of those first two films: after Mutual Appreciation's urban sprawl, he's focused again on a...

Justin Rice In Writer-director Bob Byington'S Harmony And Me. Courtesy Harmony And Me, LLC. From Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez to Bryan Poyser and the Zellner brothers, Austin is a hotbed of gifted directors, and Bob Byington now emerges from there as another talent to be reckoned with. A native of Lincoln, Nebraska, Byington studied at Uc-Santa Cruz before going to graduate school at the University of Texas, where he used his American Studies major to indulge his newfound love for the movies. In 1995, he cut his teeth as a production assistant on the indie hit The Last Supper, and the next year wrote and directed his feature debut Shameless, about an Austin-set, Generation X love triangle. His next film, Olympia, the story of a...