Renew Media extends congratulations to the eight Fellows whose work will be shown at the 32nd Toronto International Film Festival!

Arthur Dong’s Fellowship-funded documentary Hollywood Chinese will receive its international premiere at the festival. Drawing from a trove of memorable film clips, and incorporating interviews with well-known actors, Hollywood Chinese documents the visual and social history of the Chinese in American feature films.

Toronto also marks the world premiere of James Spooner’s Fellowship-funded feature narrative White Lies Black Sheep, which challenges the illusions of integration in New York City’s nightlife.

Other world premieres include Ira Sachs’ Married Life, starring Pierce Brosnan, Rachel McAdams, Patricia Clarkson and Chris Cooper, and Ellen Spiro’s Body of War, co-directed with talk show host Phil Donahue, which follows the political transformation of a US soldier wounded in Iraq.

The festival’s Wavelengths program includes Peter Hutton’s At Sea, a lyrical portrait of a container ship’s life, and Ken Jacobs’ Capitalism: Slavery, which uses video to animate nineteenth-century stereoscopic images of slaves.

Toronto will also mark the latest stop on the festival tours of Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light, which won a special jury prize at Cannes, and Gregg Araki’s Smiley Face, which is likely to be the only film in the festival that revolves around pot cupcakes.

Renew Media also wishes to congratulate Ed Radtke and Hartmut Bitomsky on the world premieres of their latest films at the 64th Venice International Film Festival.

Radtke’s The Speed of Life is part of the Venice Day Sidebar program.This fellowship-funded narrative feature follows a group of Brooklyn teenagers who spend their days stealing tourists’ video cameras and imagining themselves in better places. Their run-ins with reality involve probation officers, ex-cons, waitresses and an old man who believes he can fly.

Bitomsky’s Staub is included in the Orrizonti program. This feature film acts as essay, rhapsodizing about dust- which is everywhere and ever present and will not go away.

If you happen to be in Venice for the film festival, be sure to also check out the Biennale, which features work from Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Shih Chieh Huang and Bill Viola!