Names and faces

Director Lynn Shelton has a great idea for how to market her new film, Laggies: put video on YouTube of Keira Knightley dancing as a sign-spinner. The actress demonstrates deft sign-spinning skills in one of the opening scenes of the film, which premiered Friday at the Sundance Film Festival. The actress plays Megan, a 28-year-old who feels directionless despite her graduate degree and stable, 12-year relationship. While her friends pursue careers, marriages and babies, Megan stands in front of her dad’s tax office, dancing around with a sign that says “tax advice”in an attempt to drum up business. When Megan’s boyfriend proposes, she panics. She befriends a teenage girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) and hides out at her house, where she’s intrigued by the girl’s single dad (Sam Rockwell). Shelton, who has had three previous films at Sundance, said the cast was a dream. She said she called the best possible people for the roles, and when they all said yes, it was “freaking awesome.”

Actress Kristen Stewart endures a fair share of abuse in her latest film. In Camp X-Ray, which also premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, the actress stars as Amy Cole, a guard stationed at Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. prison in Cuba detaining terrorist suspects. In the film Stewart takes an elbow to the face, is spit on and is splattered with feces. But she learns such treatment is nothing compared to the harsh reality of the detainees, namely innocent prisoner Ali Amir, played by Peyman Moaadi, whom she befriends. First-time filmmaker Peter Sattler said he got the inspiration forCamp X-Ray after watching documentary footage of a guard and a detainee talking about books on a library cart. In his film, Stewart’s and Moaadi’s characters similarly bond over the prison’s book selection. To prepare for his role, Moaadi said, he “stayed in a prison cell for a couple of hours each day” while on location at an abandoned youthful-offender prison in Whittier, Calif. “I got let out for this,” he joked at a question-and-answer session after the film’s debut. Sattler originally intended Stewart’s role for a male, but he shifted to a female lead because he felt it created more conflict between the characters. “And Muslims’ extremist relationship toward women also complicated [the story],” he said. “So I clicked into that.”