GLANCE AT SUNDANCE
A documentary on Alien has top midnight spot at next year’s film fest,
The 2019 Sundance Film Festival will take moviegoers from the Earth to the moon and to the deepest part of space where no one can hear you scream.
Robert Redford’s annual independent film showcase in Park City, Utah, running Jan. 24 to Feb. 3, could be called a “Triple A” event for three of its most anticipated offerings: the Canadian-made environmental exposé Anthropocene, a 50th-anniversary revisiting of the Apollo 11 lunar achievement and a making-of documentary on the horror classic Alien.
They’re among the 112 features announced this week for Sundance, which has gathered films from 33 countries representing what is quite likely the fest’s most diverse slate ever: 40 per cent of the films were directed by women; 36 per cent by filmmakers of colour and 11 per cent by people who identify as LGBTQIA.
“Society relies on storytellers,” Redford said in a news release. “The choices they make, and the risks they take, define our collective experience. This year’s festival is full of storytellers who offer challenges, questions and entertainment. In telling their stories, they make difficult decisions in the pursuit of truth and art; culture reaps the reward.”
Sundance 2019 will host the international premiere of Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, the acclaimed Canadian environmental documentary by Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky, which magnificently depicts the almost artful devastation being wrought on the planet by rapacious humans. (The other Canadian feature headed for Sundance, the co-production Midnight Traveler by Hassan Fazili that will world premiere there, documents the suffering of an Afghan filmmaker and his family through Taliban persecution.)
APOLLO 11, a world premiere from Todd Douglas Miller, will compete for the U.S. documentary prize as it reconstructs the historic lunar voyage of July 1969, humanity’s first trip to another world. It promises to include never-before-seen 70 mm footage and never-beforeheard audio from the mission.
Memory: The Origins of Alien is sure to be a hot draw in the fest’s popular midnight section, which in recent years has unveiled such hits as Get Out and Hereditary. The doc by Alexandre O. Philippe, who examined Hitchcock’s horror classic Psycho with his previous film 78/52, delves into the Greek and Egyptian myths, underground comics and transgressive art that helped forge this most influential and imitated of monster movies. It’s the film with the unforgettable tag line, “In space, no one can hear you scream.”
Sundance will also run deep with world premieres of some of the most anticipated narrative films of 2019. Highlights include Bart Freundlich’s After the Wedding, a marriage mayhem story starring Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams, Billy Crudup and Abby Quinn; Nisha Ganatra’s Late Night, a battle of wits between a talkshow host and her only female staff writer, starring Emma Thompson, Mindy Kaling (who also penned the screenplay), John Lithgow, Paul Walter Hauser, Reid Scott and Amy Ryan; and Jacob Estes’ horror story Relive, a tale of a murder, a call from beyond the grave and a deep family mystery, starring David Oyelowo, Storm Reid, Mykelti Williamson, Alfred Molina and Brian Tyree Henry.
Announcing its slate earlier this week was the Slamdance Film Festival, Sundance’s Park City rival running Jan. 25 to 31, which includes several Canadian features in its lineup.
The most intriguing one is a puppet/animated hybrid with a very descriptive title: Dollhouse: The Eradication of Female Subjectivity from American Popular Culture, a Canada-U.S. co-production directed by Nicole Brending. Charting the rise and fall of Junie Spoons, a fictional child pop star, the film will have its North American premiere at Slamdance.