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After doing a little research, Crossroads has also been airing on channels such as SHOe and Time Warner Cable On Demand, both US channels I believe. Hopefully, screencaptures shall be added to the site soon; I’m keeping my fingers crossed the movie gets released on Region 2!

And finally, a trailer has been released — described as an “Open-ended Trailer from MTI Home Video” — the film itself looks lovely, and Amy of course, looks wonderful. Unfortunately, they did manage to spell Amy’s name wrong. The images have been added to the gallery and the clip to the video vault, previews & links are below, enjoy!

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Click on ‘Read the rest of this entry’ for the synopsis, which is rather spoiler-ery – and among other things, we learn that Amy’s character is called Ellie Daly.

And finally, be sure to visit the same site for brand new HQ stills of The Novice which can be found here. Enjoy!

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Recently widowed Ellie, is finally starting to put the devastating death of her young husband behind her, when tragedy strikes again. Ellie herself is suddenly staring death in the face after a near fatal allergic reaction.

Ellie awakes in hospital to find that she has gained an unwanted but remarkable gift. She can see and hear the dead. Initially terrified by the spirits that haunt her, Ellie tries to turn it to the advantage of those suffering, helping them move on from the loss of their loved ones.

After meeting Daniel and his son Jamie, her new neighbours, Ellie doesn’t realise that she has unwittingly befriended a man on the run, wanted for the brutal murder of his estranged wife. As she grows closer to the young boy and his father, she encounters Taylor, the ghost of Daniel’s dead wife and finds herself playing detective in a complex murder cover-up. Taylor tells Ellie that it is her husband Daniel she suspects of her murder. At first Ellie is horrified and calls the police. However, her instinct soon contradicts Taylor’s claim and Ellie vows to help Daniel escape, believing he is not responsible for her murder. Taylor is exasperated by Ellie’s change of heart, but stays by her side to protect her from Daniel.

Daniel has far more to contend with than the law. Taylor’s distraught brother William hires a private detective to find Daniel and soon manages to locate him. Armed and hot on their heels, William relentlessly pursues them, hell bent on revenge, and Ellie and Daniel embark on frantic chase through the city in a desperate attempt to escape him. The only way to survive is with Taylor’s help, but will she realise who the real killer is before its too late?

Mobile moviemaking: Filmmakers finish shooting ’The Novice’ in the area Set in Mobile, the movie stars Jacob Pitts, Alan Arkin and Joanne Whalley

Cast, crew and bystanders threw quick, anxious looks at the threatening sky — dark except during the short-spaced lightning bursts — on the set last week of the independent feature film “The Novice.”

Mostly, their attention was on a goat — a goat that seemed intent on giving one interpretation to the scene being filmed, whereas the director wanted another.

In other words, director Murray Robinson — a Mobile native who this past weekend concluded a month of principal photography at locations in Mobile and Baldwin counties — desired the goat to move in a particular direction.

Take after take, the goat went the other way. Actors Jacob Pitts, Alan Arkin and Joanne Whalley, who were all nearby, awaited their turn in front of the lens.

Eventually, Robinson got his shot — or, at least, some compromised version of it.

Then the rain fell hard and sent everyone and a great deal of expensive moviemaking equipment racing for the shelter of the St. Joan of Arc School on Ann Street, which in the movie is standing in for the fictional Seaside Rescue Mission.

“You have to be willing to compromise,” said Robinson a couple of days prior to that frustrating scene with the goat. “Every single day on the set, somebody comes up and you have to compromise this, change that and accommodate the other. You have to accommodate an actor or just accommodate a physical reality.”

For instance, Robinson explained, a doorway too narrow for the camera dolly can cause an intricately planned moving shot to be restaged as a static affair, with the movie camera bound to “sticks” — meaning a tripod.

“Then it goes the other way, too,” Robinson said. “Sometimes you end up getting something that’s far more than you wanted. But you have to adapt. There’s a thousand decisions every hour, and some of them are all you can hope and more and others are not.”

After years spent making TV commercials and working in other capacities on other people’s movie projects, Robinson is thrilled that filming of his first feature went so well.

“In fact, it has gone a lot better than I ever would have hoped,” Robinson said a few days shy of wrapping the production. The last day of filming was Saturday.

Even the weather cooperated, for the most part. That’s saying a lot for a four-week period that was so wet with rainfall. It was one of the soggiest Junes on record across much of the region, with three times the normal rainfall in some areas and July on a similar track.

But, said the director, “When you need it to rain, it rains. When you don’t need it to rain, it clears.”

He jokingly credited the movie’s producer, Fairhope-based Scott Lumpkin and a veteran producer on many movies shot in the area, for arranging the weather.

In the latter half of last year alone, Lumpkin lensed two feature films in south Alabama. “Dead Birds,” a Civil War era ghost story, is headed to a theatrical distribution. “Bayou,” a horror film shot deep within the watery Mobile-Tensaw Delta, is on a fast track to home video distribution.

Unlike all the other movies Lumpkin has worked on in and around Mobile, “The Novice” is actually set in Mobile.

“This movie says ’Mobile,’” Lumpkin said. “It’s very much Mobile. It captures the essence of Mobile.”

The film’s lead player, actor Jacob Pitts, said he valued the opportunity to come to the South and make a movie. The New York-based thespian’s past roles have included parts in the features “Eurotrip,” “K-19: The Widowmaker,” “Pipe Dream” and “Zen and the Art of Landscaping.” On TV, Pitts has appeared in such series as “Ed,” “Sex and the City” and “Law & Order.”

“I have never really been down here,” Pitts said during a short break from filming, while one of the crew members dried his shirt with a hair dryer. His shirt was damp from sweat after Pitts repeatedly fell from a faux-concrete wall during take after take of what may be just one shot in the finished film.

“One of the great things is you can go to different places,” Pitts said. “I have gone to Canada. I have gone to the Czech Republic. You can just go and experience cultures that you never would. It’s exciting to go from New York and come to Alabama, where it is an incredibly different culture.”

Recalled fellow actor Arkin, “I did a film here a long time ago, in Selma, about 35 years ago. It’s very relaxed. It’s very easy going, very loose — a very pleasant place to work.”

Arkin — a veteran actor, author, director, singer and composer — has a long resume that includes parts in such films as “Catch-22,” “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution,” “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “Gross Pointe Blank.” On TV, he recently had a lead role in the two-season cable series “100 Centre Street.”

The movie he made in Selma is “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,” first released in 1968.

What sets “The Novice” apart from the typical studio-made, Hollywood movie these days, Arkin said, is that, “there are no murders and there are no car crashes.”

He said, “I play a Jesuit priest. I’ve never played a Jesuit priest before, so I thought I would give it a whirl. Murray also said he liked the idea of me doing some improvising, and that is my background — improvisation. So between the two things, I got excited.”

In 1960, Arkin became a member of Chicago’s Second City Group, co-starring in the improvisational revue “Second City.”

Pitts found something similarly appealing in Robinson’s script for “The Novice.”

“I was attracted because it was a movie set in religion but not about religion,” the younger actor said. “It’s just an interesting backdrop.”

The plot of “The Novice” involves a pair of Jesuit seminarians who come to Mobile to work in a soup kitchen. Pitts plays the main character, Peter, and co-star Matthew Carey portrays fellow seminarian, Gilbert.

Carey, who has had a number of roles in feature films and has been a guest player on such TV shows as “24″ and “ER,” said he particularly likes his part in “The Novice” because his character has an arc to follow. The character develops through the film and does not wind up, figuratively, in the same place he begins.

About his character, Carey said, “He’s this kid who wants to become a Jesuit. That’s what his purpose in life is. At the beginning of the film, he is focused on that. … Through the course of this film, over the summer, he and this other guy go to this mission called Seaside. Their paths change and make them realize what they are really meant for.”

Offered Pitts, “It’s not a typical coming-of-age film where you have a character who is with the wrong girl or something like that. It is more someone who has chosen this path. … It turns out that, like every other path, there are compromises and there is disappointment. Facing those, you either decide to stick with that path or choose another.”

Lumpkin said he and his filmmaking partners intend to “go all the way with this one,” aiming for a major theatrical distribution of their movie in 2005. They hope to enter the finished movie in major film festivals, where it may find that distribution commitment.

Source: Whedon.info

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Extract below; view the article in full; visit the official website (both open in a new window.)

“Telling our stories” is the mantra of the Crossroads Film Festival, a four-day celebration of independent film kicking off its eighth year today.

…Some films even make their debut at Crossroads.

?There’s quite a few that are Mississippi premieres and a couple of world premieres as well,” Snell said.

One film making its world premiere at Crossroads is The Novice, a film written and directed by Mobile native Murray Robinson, a graduate of Millsaps College who wrote the film’s script while living in Jackson.

The film tells the story of Peter (Jacob Pitts), a Jesuit seminarian whose path in life is altered when he falls in love with a flower child named Jill (Amy Acker). The supporting cast includes Oscar winner Alan Arkin as well as acting vets Frank Langella and Orson Bean, who all play priests.

The film was shot in Robinson’s home state of Alabama and financed by local money. The film was completed in 2005, and while Robinson has been seeking a theatrical release for the film, Arkin’s recent Oscar win has brought welcome attention to The Novice.

?When we cast Alan, Little Miss Sunshine hadn’t even gone into production yet,” Robinson said. ?None of that could have been foreseen … we were delighted when he read the script and liked it and responded to it.”

EDIT: It looks like The Novice is premiering tonight @ 7pm but if you’re in the area, you can still get tickets — visit the website for more details.