Sundance is the first big festival of the year, as the major awards bodies prepare to honour the films from last year, Park City, Utah hopes to kick off the next award season. While some projects come into the festival already with distributors, the festival is ripe with projects hoping to create buzz to find homes. Amongst last year’s titles, A Real Pain had its World Premiere at Sundance last year before getting acquired by Searchlight Pictures. It is now nominated for two Academy Awards. It will take a year to see the fruits of the festival buzz but early sales are already rolling in with the LGBTQ+ Cactus Pears landing MPM Premium for International Sales and the documentary One to One: John and Yoko landing with Magnolia for an IMAX followed by a MAX/HBO release. Regardless of whether a film has distribution or is looking to acquire it, that first festival buzz is important, and below are some of the buzziest titles at this year’s festival.
Every so often, a film comes along that has a concept that stands out enough that its logline alone can generate conversation. This year at Sundance, it is By Design in their Next section. “A woman swaps bodies with a chair, and everyone likes her better as a chair.” That logline alone would have built significant interest in the film from writer/director Amanda Kramer, it also has a stacked cast, including Juliette Lewis, Mamoudou Athie, Melanie Griffith, Samantha Mathis, Robin Tunney, and Udo Kier, to name a few.
Not to be outdone, fellow writer/director Hailey Gates is creating plenty of buzz with her satire Atropia, premiering in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. It stars Alia Shawkat as an aspiring actress in a military role-playing facility who falls in love with a soldier cast as an insurgent. The fake war zone even has its own fake news channel, fake war correspondent, and all. Fiction and reality are sure to get messy.
Eva Victor may find herself compared to Phoebe Waller-Bridge as a multi-hyphenate writer-director-actor with her reflective non-linear Sorry, Baby, which she stars in and has its World Premiere in the US Dramatic Competition. While using wit and humour, the film is not a comedy. It uses its structure to explore the character’s trauma, setbacks, and attempts to heal.
I grew up loving musicals because of my father; he had many musical albums and cassettes. And for some reason, he had two copies of Kiss of the Spider Woman. He apparently is not the only superfan, as the Bill Condon-directed Kiss of the Spider Woman is one of the hottest tickets at Sundance. The musical film, adapted from the stage musical based on the novel by Manuel Puig, stars Jennifer Lopez and Diego Luna. Lopez was given a standing ovation for her performance at the premiere (Luna could not attend) but it is Tonatiuh playing Luis Molina whose performance will have people taking note.
Festivals have become a place for independently produced TV to find distributors. Last year the Mark Duplass and Mel Eslyn series Penelope premiered at Sundance before landing at Netflix. This year, a series hoping to find a home is Hal & Harper from creator and star Cooper Raiff. This marks a return to Sundance for Raiff, who was previously at the festival with the film Cha Cha Real Smooth. His latest episodic venture is a dramedy series that also stars Lili Reinhart and Mark Ruffalo. What makes the project stand out is that it is flashback-heavy, but the characters all still play their younger selves, including Reinhart and Raiff playing elementary school-aged versions.
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