Amazon spends big at festival
Buys Sundance grand jury prize winner One Child Nation, other films
LOS ANGELES — Amazon Studios has picked up global rights to One Child Nation, a documentary about China’s policy of forcibly restricting family size that debuted to great acclaim at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The deal is said to be in the high-six figures.
The sale comes on the heels of the film’s grand jury prize triumph — One Child Nation won the top honour for documentary filmmaking at Saturday’s award ceremony as negotiations were wrapping up.
Among other winners, Clemency, a drama directed by Chinonye Chukwu and starring Alfre Woodard, about a prison warden on death row duty, won the grand jury prize for drama. Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir won the world cinema jury prize.
Audience prizes went to the inspirational comedy Brittany Runs a Marathon and Knock Down the House, which tracks the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others in the U.S. congressional race. Netflix bought Knock Down the House out of the festival.
It has been a busy festival for Amazon. The company shelled out $14 million for The Report, a political thriller with Adam Driver (figures in U.S. dollars). It dropped $5 million on the Shia LaBeouf drama/cinematic therapy session Honey Boy; it dropped $14 million for the self-improvement comedy Brittany Runs a Marathon; and spent $13 million for Late Night, a buzzy look at diversity in writer’s rooms that stars Mindy Kaling and Emma Thompson. No other company was as active as Amazon was in terms of Sundance deal-making this year.
The deal for the Chinese film is for all rights excluding U.S. TV, and for TV rights in Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, U.K., Netherlands, and all of Scandinavia with the exception of Finland.
Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang produce and direct the film, which looks at state-enforced sterilizations, kidnappings, and other brutal means of preventing Chinese citizens from having more than one child. This policy lasted from 1979 to 2015, but the movie makes it clear that the trauma from the social experiment to make it illegal for couples to have more than one child, endures. Wang delved deep into her own family history to tell that story.
In a positive review, IndieWire’s Eric Kohn wrote, “As a brilliant combination of cultural reporting and interpersonal reckoning, One Child Nation manages to encapsulate decades of under-reported events within a palatable narrative accessible to even to viewers with no prior understanding of the policy’s history.”