Sundance Film Festival heads reveal the films and filmmakers launching projects at January’s event who they believe will set the bar for the whole of 2024.
Sundance celebrates its 40th anniversary edition this week (January 18-28), but the fallout from four years of Hollywood upheaval will be top of mind when the industry gathers in Park City.
The pandemic and dominance of streaming platforms have put paid in large part to the headline-grabbing theatrical deals of previous years which, along with the ongoing box-office challenges exacerbated by last year’s US writers and actors strikes, have framed conversations around the festival’s evolving role.
Yet Sundance acquisitions have never stopped, even during the virtual 2021 and 2022 editions, when the lag time in closing deals became prolonged, befitting a climate where caution prevails among distributors.
Last year’s festival drew splashy buys, albeit mostly involving streamers as Apple snapped up Flora And Son and Netflix took Fair Play. Searchlight Pictures swooped on Theater Camp — which scored one of the highest per-theatre averages at the US box office when it opened last summer — and the ill-fated Magazine Dreams, shelved due to actor Jonathan Majors’ assault trial and conviction.
A multitude of smaller buys each year, either on site or trickling in over the weeks and months that follow, cement Sundance’s role as the opening chapter of the year ahead in independent cinema, as acclaimed narrative films and documentaries find their audience. Some will go on to screen in Berlin on the back of strong reviews, kickstarting a long festival career. Others figure prominently in awards season: 2023 selection Past Lives is tipped to earn Oscar and Bafta nominations, along with documentary contenders and Park City premieres 20 Days In Mariupol and Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, both short/longlisted by the US and UK academies.
Talent pool
The Sundance leadership understands the impact of industry dynamics and shift in viewing habits, yet each year it offers up a new class of emerging talent to complement returning or established filmmakers, confident in its role as a beacon of discovery. Celine Song, the first-time director of Past Lives, is a prime example and will collect the Sundance Institute’s Vanguard award for fiction at the opening-night gala fundraiser on January 18. The point will not be lost either on Trailblazer award recipient Christopher Nolan, the UK director of Oppenheimer whose breakthrough feature Memento played Park City in 2001.
There is demonstrable proof Sundance is inspiring a wider number of emerging filmmakers. This year’s selections comes from a record 17,435 submissions from 153 countries or territories, including 4,410 feature-length films — the result of outreach efforts that spawned Sundance London, celebrating its 12th year this summer, and Sundance Film Festival Asia, which took place in Taiwan for the first time in 2023.
“Our job is to curate the most exciting, bold work,” notes Sundance Institute CEO Joana Vicente when asked about the declining number of major theatrical deals and the challenges facing the theatrical distribution market. “There are many ways we track the success of a filmmaker,” she adds. “It’s looking not just at sales as being the metric for the success of the festival slate. It can be about a great review, a meaningful connection, getting representation. It’s about launching careers.
“Sometimes films might not find homes in the US or elsewhere, but it’s about what’s next for that filmmaker.”
The impact of the pandemic and how the festival was staged undoubtedly enabled Sundance to reach wider audiences. Festival figures show that 86,824 individuals attended Sundance 2023 in-person, representing a steep drop from 116,800 in 2020 (the last in-person edition before the pandemic). But last year’s festival also registered 423,234 combined in‑person and online viewership.
Sundance is again a hybrid event this year. Films will play exclusively in-person for the first six days, before Sundance’s acclaimed portal opens to press and industry on January 24 and to the US public the following day.
“That in-person experience for the first days sets the tone for so much that will happen in the second half of the festival,” says Eugene Hernandez, marking his first full year in the role of festival director and head of public programming. “The hybrid component is fundamental to our ability to amplify and showcase all this work for a wider audience in the US and to the press and industry internationally.”
The festival asserts that the Hollywood strikes barely affected this year’s selection. “We received a few films that had interim [filming] agreements and made it into the festival,” says director of programming Kim Yutani, pointing to Sean Wang’s US dramatic competition entry Dìdi and Premieres selection Ghostlight from Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson as part of a small list.
Yutani’s highlights include world cinema dramatic competition titles Sujo from Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez, the Mexican director behind 2020 Sundance world cinema dramatic audience winner Identifying Features; Daniel Hoesl and Julia Niemann’s Austrian entry Veni Vidi Vici (acquired by Magnify, formerly known as Magnolia Pictures International); and Shiori Ito’s world cinema documentary competition entry Black Box Diaries.
Hernandez cites the “bonkers” Midnight entry Krazy House starring Nick Frost as a must-see and draws attention to “the richness of the Episodic section”, with picks including La Mesías from Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi.
Yutani points to Conbody Vs Everybody from Debra Granik, who made her name at Sundance in 2010 with Jennifer Lawrence breakout Winter’s Bone, and Rory Kennedy’s The Synanon Fix. Richard Linklater is there too with God Save Texas: Hometown Prison, one of three perspectives on the Lone Star State under the triptych God Save Texas.
Linklater is also screening his popular Venice and Toronto premiere Hit Man (which was acquired by Netflix) in Spotlight and is one of several returning heroes alongside Nolan and Steven Soderbergh, back with Lucy Liu horror thriller Presence, his first directorial outing to play Sundance since his career-launching sex, lies, and videotape back in 1989.
Eight features and 53 shorts will commemorate the festival’s 40th anniversary, among them Napoleon Dynamite, Mississippi Masala and The Babadook. These are part of a schedule of screenings and talks programmed for the second half of the festival, from January 23-26.
Research required
Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is the opening night film at the festival’s Salt Lake City-hosted portion. There will be no single opening night film in Park City — rather, the festival has programmed 19 premieres to play on January 18.
There is the usual cohort of studio titles looking to generate early buzz while the majority of films will arrive without distribution, as they have done in the decades since Robert Redford first established the festival, looking to follow in the footsteps of Song, Nolan, Linklater, Soderbergh, et al.
“It’s going to take folks a minute to do a little bit of research and start learning about these films,” says Hernandez. “This is such a strong, tightly curated roster of films. Our hope is that the industry and press and curators from around the world will be there to meet this line-up and take it to the next level.”
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