Sundance stocks up for new DOCday strand

Following plans for a weekly doc strand next month, US cable network Sundance Channel has picked up the US rights to four Canadian, Australian and Chilean feature documentaries for the DOCday block.

The newly acquired titles, making their US television premieres in April, are the Canadian documentary The Last Just Man; Film Australia shows Cunnamulla and City of Dreams; and award-winning Chile, Obstinate Memory.

Distributed by Barna-Alper Productions and produced by Alan Mendelsohn for History Television, The Last Just Man is directed by Steven Silver.

Airing in the first week of April in a 21.00 slot, it is an account of Rwanda's spiral into genocide in the early 1990s, seen largely through the eyes of UN peacekeeper Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire.

Next up is Dennis O'Rourke's Cunnamulla, an award-winning look at an isolated country town, west of Brisbane. It is a Film Australia National Interest Programme in association with Camerawork and was produced with the assistance of the ABC.

Another Australian doc to make its US premiere is City of Dreams, directed by Belinda Mason and produced by Gaby Mason. A Film Australia programme produced with the assistance of the ABC, it examines the story of architect Marion Mahony.

Chile, Obstinate Memory, directed by Patricio Guzman and produced by First Run and Icarus Films, chronicles the US-backed coup that overthrew Salvador Allende's democratically elected Marxist government in 1973.

Sundance's DOCday launches in March and continues every Monday from noon to midnight with a weekly feature premiere at 21:00. It will feature a mix of original segments with independent non-fiction films.

The first month's offerings are: The Trials of Henry Kissinger; Offspring; If I Should Fall From Grace; McLuhan's Wake; and The Inner Tour, which was a 2001 grant recipient of the Sundance Institute's International Documentary Fund.