At Sundance: Coming of Age, Going to China

Phoebe in Wonderland, which is represented by Endeavor and United Talent Agency, could be the next buzzed-about film at the Sundance Film Festival to close a deal, Andrea Chalupa reports from Park City, Utah.

At a Sundance reception at Shabu today, Ben Barnz, the producer, said a deal was being brokered as he spoke for this drama about a young girl (Elle Fanning, Dakota's sister) who loses herself in a make-believe world to escape her disruptive home and school life. Felicity Huffman also stars.

Also at the event was Montreal-based filmmaker Yung Chang whose documentary Up the Yangtze tells the story of a cruise boat that shuffles tourists up the Yangtze River in China to see it before the gorge is entirely flooded. Chang calls his movie "The Love Boat meets Apocolypse Now."

It premiers this April in New York and is a great window into the modernization of China is in as it scrambles to clean up in time for the 2008 Olympics.

Then there's The Linguists, about rare and dying languages, many that won't outlast this century. According to a New York Times story last fall, of the 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, close to half are in danger of extinction.

Jeremy Newberger and Seth Kramer first began work on this passion project as an exploration of Yiddish, which Kramer said he grew up speaking at home. The search to explore the fate of Yiddish led them onto a different path, exploring rare and dying languages from South America, India, and Siberia. They've gotten some interest from distributors, including HBO and Sony Pictures Classics, but no deal yet.

Dr. James Orbinski, 1999 Nobel Peace Prize recipient for his work as president of Doctors Without Borders, spoke about Triage, a documentary directred by Patrick Reed, that follows his work as a field doctor in the Somali famine and Rwandan genocide.