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Christine McPherson (entrancingly played by Saoirse Ronan) is a strong-minded, rebellious yet vulnerable seventeen-year-old—otherwise known as “Lady Bird”—who thinks that life in Sacramento is dull and holding her back, preventing her from being herself. She dreams of attending East Coast colleges and romanticizes life as a writer in New York City or in rural Connecticut. This is at odds with her mother Marion (an intimidating Laurie Metcalf) who is both equally a caring and unyielding mother. This familiar yet nuanced mother-daughter relationship is at the very core of Lady Bird. But the film also beautifully explores the title character’s coming to terms with life beyond her home; Lady Bird is as much about fleeing home as it is about one’s unconditional love for it. Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut takes the all too familiar coming-of-age teen drama and makes it uniquely wonderful and fresh. The film...

Writer/Director Ry Russo-Young’s previous films – the award-winning experimental short, Marion, and subsequent features, Orphans and You Won’t Miss Me – featured strong, independent women that pushed boundaries as a way of defining themselves. Her latest film, Nobody Walks, based on a script developed with Lena Dunham at the Sundance Institute, focuses on a young, sexually liberated New York artist Martine (Olivia Thirlby) who comes to L.A. to finish her experimental film. Martine uses her sexuality to go after what she wants, leading other characters to acts of betrayal that compromise their trust in one another. The ensemble cast also includes John Kraskinski and Rosemarie DeWitt. During our roundtable interview, Russo-Young talked about why she intended this as a movie about coming of age regardless of what age you are, how she wanted to examine the evolving chemistry between characters and the impact their decisions had on those...

The 26th-29th April sees the Sundance London Film and Music festival hit the O2 Arena, which sees the festival – renowned for its programme of independent film – take place in the UK for the first time in its 34-year history.

As a Sundance newbie, I am excited to attend the indie festival. I’ve always heard so many great things about it, especially as a lot of great films initially got noticed at previous Sundance fests (Napoleon Dynamite, Clerks, Reservoir Dogs).

Looking at the line-up, I expect the cream of the crop of forthcoming independent releases.

Here are the following that I’m keeping my eye on during the festival:

For Ellen

The third feature film from In Between Days and Treeless Mountain writer and director So Yong Kim, and her first film with an American cast – a great cast ensemble, I need to add. Starring Little Miss Sunshine‘s...

The Sundance Institute and The O2 announced today the programme of 14 narrative and documentary feature films that will make their UK premieres at the inaugural Sundance London festival, taking place at The O2 from 26-29 April. These films premiered in January at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah – the premier independent film festival in the United States.

“I welcome the opportunity to see how people in the UK experience these films,” said Robert Redford, President and Founder of Sundance Institute. “While they are American productions they speak to universal experiences and global challenges.”

He went on to add, “Sundance London also is the perfect opportunity to continue our long-time commitment to growing a broader international community around new voices and new perspectives.”

John Cooper, Director of the Sundance Film Festival, said, “Sundance London grew out of our desire to help American independent filmmakers expand their reach, and we...

2012 will be the first year that Sundance comes to London and we here at HeyUGuys are very excited about it. It takes place 26th – 29th April and we’re hoping to be there to cover as much of the event as is possible.

Incase you’re not familiar with Sundance, it is a spin-off from the big Us event which takes place in Park City, Utah at the beginning of the year. In a nutshell, Sundance is a four-day festival that will include film screenings, live music performances, discussions, panels and other public cultural programming will be held 26 – 29 April, 2012 at The O2 in London. Robert Redford is due to open the festival with a discussion connecting film and music. ‘An Evening with Robert Redford and T Bone Burnett’ will be moderated by author and screenwriter Nick Hornby.

Today we get to see the full line-up of movies that will be...

Magnolia Pictures has closed deals to pick up three titles from the Sundance Film Festival with Compliance, Nobody Walks, and 2 Days in New York.

Compliance comes from writer-director Craig Zobel, and is based on a true story. The plot revolves around a fast food manager (Ann Dowd) who receives a call from the police that an employee (Dreama Walker) stole from a customer. The manager detains her employee in the story, when things start to spiral out of control.

Nobody Walks stars John Krasinski as a Hollywood sound designer, who agrees to help the beautiful young Martine (Olivia Thirlby) with her film, as a favor to his wife (Rosemarie DeWitt). Ry Russo-Young directs from a script she co-wrote with Lena Dunham.

2 Days in New York is director Julie Delpy's sequel to her 2007 comedy 2 Days in Paris. Julie Delpy reprises her role as Marion from the original, with Chris Rock and Vincent Gallo also starring.

Something of a prodigy even before she made her first feature, Manhattan native Ry Russo-Young (Orphans) had an early apprenticeship in the medium, studying visual arts and drama at Oberlin College and Yale, respectively, before putting in some time at the Lee Strasberg Institute and Nyu’s Tisch School of the Arts. Russo-Young eventually directed the short film Marion, a multi-screen deconstruction of scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho enacted by three actresses, which won the 2005 Silver Hugo Award for best experimental short film at the Chicago International Film Festival. Two years later, she debuted Orphans, an emotionally wrenching drama about two twentysomething sisters, estranged since the death of their parents, reuniting at the family’s isolated country-getaway house in the midst of winter. The film, produced and co-edited by Russo-Young’s mentor Amir Naderi (A.B.C…, Manhattan), made a splash on the American independent scene, picking up a Special Jury Award at…...

Ry Russo-Young, who many will remember from her role in Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs, was a prize winner at two of the last three SXSWs - she won the jury award for best experimental film for her Psycho deconstruction Marion at the 2006 fest and shared a special jury prize for Orphans at the 2007 edition. Orphans hits DVD next week via David Redmon and Ashley Sabin's brand new label Carnivalesque Films. She chatted with us this week about Why Does Herr R Run Amok?, what working with the band "The Virgins" on her new film <a hre ...

• This is part fout of our continuing Tribeca Coverage. You can read about the competitive sections of the festival in part one, the non competitive selections in part two, the section 'Rediscovered', 'Spotlight' and 'Midnight Movies' in part 3.   The 2006 Tribeca Film Festival announced yesterday the line-up for its Short Film Competitions. The program includes 76 shorts selected from among 2,150 submissions. Included are short films by Laurie Anderson, Faith Hubley, Abbas Kiarostami, Sylvia Kristel, Bill Morrison and Jay Rosenblatt. There is also a strong representation from top film schools, including AFI, Columbia, Nyu, UCLA, USC as well as international film programs in Israel, Mexico, South Korea, and Australia. The series also feature works directed by New York music icon Laurie Anderson and actors Adrian Grenier and Melissa Joan Hart. Appearing in this yearâ€.s short narrative films are actors David Straitharn, Henry Winkler, Sandra Bernhard, and Jeffrey Tambor. Documentary subjects include Don Cheadle,

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