TWO important inaugurations occur in the US today: that of George W. Bush and that of two new competitive strands at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. At a time when the current Administration has a unilateral approach to international politics, America’s premiere film event has embarked on an altogether different foreign policy: the World Cinema Dramatic and Documentary Competitions.

Sundance began life as the USA Film Festival, a showcase for American independent cinema. But over the years, as the festival gained international stature, its outward vision was constrained by its mandate. International producers were unwilling to place their films in a Stars-and-Stripes event. The new competitive strands are an effort to build an international marketplace. A film festival’s reputation is built on three pillars: programme, audience and marketplace. By expanding the festival’s repertoire, the Sundance director, Geoff Gilmore, hopes to build the market for foreign-language films in the US — and the stature of his event — by putting American buyers into cinemas alongside enthusiastic Sundance audiences.

It’s an ambitious exercise, the difficulty of which is apparent from the meagre supply of world premieres in the new competitions — only five of 16 titles in dramatic and five of 12 in documentary. Sundance is in no position to demand exclusivity because most producers of foreign films are unwilling to forgo the chance of a competition slot at Berlin or Cannes, especially as the market for foreign-language productions in the US is generally poor. Politics plays a part: Gilmore might love to programme an Iranian title but no Iranian film-maker cares to be fingerprinted and photographed for the experience.

Films from the UK and other English-language nations are another story. Over the years UK titles such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels have arrived on the US market through Sundance. Indeed, Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake tries the same route this year. And one of this year’s world dramatic competition premieres is from the UK. Gaby Dellal’s On a Clear Day features Peter Mullan as a depressed man who confronts his demons by setting out to swim the Channel. Like Sundance, he’s starting from scratch.

The result is that this year is like most years and next year probably will be the same: the new stuff — the films no one has seen — is mostly American.

Top of everyone’s list is Hard Candy by the first-time director David Slade, an expat Brit, and written by Brian Nelson, whose ten-year writing career is highlighted by such undistinguished credits as Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. Using one location and two actors, Hard Candy tells the story of a young woman who turns the tables on an internet stalker.

Also drawing early buzz is The Dying Gaul, the directorial debut of the American playwright Craig Lucas (he wrote the screenplay for the seminal gay-themed film Longtime Companion). The Hollywood-set thriller features Peter Sarsgaard as a struggling screenwriter who has written a heart-wrenching screenplay about his lover’s death from Aids. A charming but sleazy producer, played by Campbell Scott, offers him $1 million on the condition that he change the male character into a woman.

The festival’s American line-up is also notable for the appearance of some Oscar-winning male movie stars whose careers have been wavering of late. Theirs are not the faces one normally associates with Sundance.

Kevin Costner stars opposite Joan Allen in The Upside of Anger from the writer-director Mike Binder. It’s being called a modern re-envisioning of the classic melodrama, with Costner’s laconic neighbour making a play for Allen’s stressed-out single mother. Those who have seen it say it’s a Costner we’ve never seen before.

Daniel Day-Lewis, who hasn’t been seen since Gangs of New York in 2002, resurfaces for The Ballad of Jack and Rose, written and directed by his wife, Rebecca Miller. Miller’s Personal Velocity won the dramatic competition in 2003. Day-Lewis plays a hippy whose utopian dreams for himself and his daughter are shattered by terminal illness.

Adrien Brody stars in John Maybury’s time-travelling psycho-thriller The Jacket as a Gulf War vet whose amnesia prevents him from defending himself against a murder charge back home. Keira Knightley and Kris Kristofferson co-star.

He may not have won an Academy Award but Pierce Brosnan continues to battle the Bond Curse, this time playing a somewhat Bond-like character, a professional assassin who befriends Greg Kinnear’s travelling salesman in Richard Shepard’s comedy The Matador.

Michael Keaton is making a comeback, following up the current North American hit White Noise with Game 6, from the director Mike Hoffman, with a screenplay by the novelist Don DeLillo. Keaton stars as a baseball-obsessed down-on-his-luck New York playwright who is being pushed to the brink by his favourite team and a ruthless theatre critic, played with poisonous zeal by Robert Downey Jr.

As for the documentaries, they remain Sundance’s ace in the hole if only because most of them, unencumbered by stars and hence expectation, fly below the radar. Some beg to be seen, such as Murderball, a portrait of wheelchair-smashing quadriplegic rugby players, and The Aristocrats, in which 100 comedians are asked to riff on the same “very, very dirty joke” in the spirit of motto “it’s the singer, not the song”. Others are must-sees because of the film-maker: Eugene Jarecki, whose previous film The Trials of Henry Kissinger argued pointedly for an investigation of Nixon’s Secretary of State, returns with Why We Fight, an exploration of American militarism that uses the present US action in Iraq as its starting point.

If there’s one foreign policy issue the Bush Administration and the Sundance Film Festival can agree on, America continues to be at the centre of the world.

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