Following its purchase of the Sundance Channel last year, Rainbow Media today announced that Sundance Selects, a new transactional video-on-demand film offering, will launch Wednesday, August 26. Sundance Selects will debut with Spike Lee’s acclaimed film, “Passing Strange The Movie,” which is based on a musical developed at the Sundance Theater Lab and the Sundance Directors Lab, and which premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Sundance Selects titles will be available on the on-demand platform of major cable operators, including Comcast, Cox and Cablevision.
Sundance Selects creates a new national platform for independent film in the documentary and world cinema categories, marking the first time a transactional on-demand platform has existed for feature documentary films. At launch, the service will feature one premiere title a month on demand, with plans to increase the offering to two premiere titles each month. In addition to “Passing Strange The Movie” (August 26), Sundance Selects will release the following acclaimed films, each of which have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival: Alexis Dos Santos’s drama “Unmade Beds” (September 9); Academy Award-winner Adam Elliot’s animated film “Mary and Max,” which opened the 2009 Sundance Film Festival (October 14); and Chris Wiatt’s documentary “A Complete History of My Sexual Failures” (January 2010). The service will also release Kief Davidson’s
acclaimed documentary “Kassim the Dream,” which premiered at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival (November 4), and Tom Thurman’s documentary “Nick Nolte: No Exit” (December 16).
In “Passing Strange The Movie,” Spike Lee captures the eponymous Broadway musical show written by singer/songwriter Stew (with music co-written by his creative partner, Heidi Rodewald), uniting revelatory theater with superb filmmaking. Passing Strange The Movie tells the semi-autobiographical story of a young black man who leaves behind his middle-class, church-ruled upbringing in mid-1970s LA to travel to Europe in search of his artistic and personal identity, or what he calls “the real.” Picaresque misadventures with sex, drugs, politics, and art await him in far-out Amsterdam and hyper-militant Berlin . His eyes are opened ever wider, even revealing what he left behind. A superb cast, ably supported by sparing (but pitch-perfect) costumes, design, and stagecraft, bring to life the emotionally charged story with its astounding original music, narrated and overseen by Stew himself. Lee’s multi-camera coverage of the event (including backstage scenes) involves the audience in not only the text but the electricity of the ensemble’s onstage adventure. It’s a tour-de-force of creative collaboration and inspiration.
