by Helen Barlow
The Sundance Festival usually unspools in two halves, with the second half a cheaper deal for the public as the stars largely turn up during the first five days. This year, the festival has essentially halved in time – there will be 72 feature films compared to last year’s 118 – and there will be few starry vehicles. There were always going to be few stars prepared to travel in any case.
This means that an Australian film, Sally Aitken’s Playing with Sharks, might have a huge presence. Sharks, with their big sharp teeth and huge jaws, are always a huge cinematic draw. That an Australian woman and shark fanatic Valerie Taylor is the subject of the film makes it all the more appealing. Taylor filmed the real sharks for Jaws and famously wore a chain mail suit, using herself as shark bait, in experiments that changed scientific understanding of sharks forever.
Two other Australian projects will be part of the programme. The virtual reality project Prison X – The Devil & The Sun by writer-director Violeta Ayala looks intriguing if the blurb is any indication: “Heavy doors open up and suck you in as a world of magical realism swirls around you, where you have to hang onto your soul, so the devil doesn’t take it away.” The animated short GNT from writer-director Sara Hirner and Rosemary Vasquez-Brown follows Glenn, a woman on an unwholesome mission to conquer her clique and social media at large.
Otherwise, Erik Thomson co-stars with Daniel Gillies in James Ashcroft’s New Zealand thriller Coming Home in the Dark. It follows a family’s outing that descends into terror as they are confronted and captured by a pair of drifters.
Overall, the festival boasts a programme where over half of the films are by first-time directors and 47 per cent are directed by women. Most prominent of these and ticking both boxes are:
*Robin Wright’s Land, where the House of Cards actress stars in a poignant story of a woman’s search for meaning in the harsh American wilderness after an unfathomable event.
*Rebecca Hall’s racially-charged Passing starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as African-American sisters who can both pass as white and choose to live on opposite sides of the colour line in 1929 New York.
Ben Wheatley will premiere his virus movie In the Earth Two, while two other prominent British blokes will also premiere new documentaries – but not their highly anticipated upcoming dramatic features. Edgar Wright (whose big starry Working Title movie Last Night in Soho releases in April) has also directed The Sparks Brothers, billed as a musical odyssey through five weird and wonderful decades with brothers Ron & Russell Mael, celebrating the inspiring legacy of the little-known rock band Sparks.
Kevin Macdonald, the director of the upcoming real life Guantanamo Bay drama The Mauritanian, will premiere Life in a Day 2020, a global portrait of life on our planet, filmed by thousands of people across the world, on a single day: 25th July 2020.
Meanwhile James Redford, the son of Sundance founder Robert Redford, will present the documentary Unintended Memoir about Amy Tan, the author of The Joy Luck Club who has established herself as one of America’s most respected literary voices. Although born to Chinese immigrant parents, it would be decades before Tan would fully understand the inherited trauma rooted in the legacies of women who survived the Chinese tradition of concubinage.
