by Helen Barlow
Goran Stolevski’s Australian film You Won’t Be Alone premieres in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition. Starring Noomi Rapace and Alice Englert, the film is set in an isolated mountain village in 19th century Macedonia and follows a young feral witch who accidentally kills a peasant. She assumes the peasant’s shape to see what life is like in her skin, igniting a deep-seated curiosity to experience life inside the bodies of others. A perfect role for the Swedish actress who portrayed Lisbeth Salander in the Millennium series.
Australian director Sophie Hyde, who had a major hit with Animals in Sundance 2019, and also made 52 Tuesdays (which also screened in Sundance), will world premiere her British sex comedy, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande [pictured, main image] starring Emma Thompson and Irish actor Daryl McCormack (Peaky Blinders), in the premieres section. Thompson plays a retired schoolteacher who yearns for good sex and hires a young sex worker. The film will no doubt be a lot of fun.
The Australian VR “experience” Godwana by lead artists Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts will premiere in the VR section. It runs for 24 hours and explores alternative futures for the ancient Daintree rainforest. Meanwhile, the NZ work Atua by Tanu Gago and Jermaine Dean reimagines the realm of Pacific gods in a sculptural AR experience.
Also enjoying its world premiere is the Australian short film Shark [below] directed by Nash Edgerton and written by Edgerton and David Michôd, starring Rose Byrne and Edgerton. Screening in the international live action shorts programme, in a prestigious Day One slot, the story follows the continuing adventures of Jack, who loves to prank. But in his latest relationship, he may have finally met his match.
From New Zealand, comes the short film Breathe directed and written by Stephen Kang. It tells of gifted twelve-year-old Jaehee, who uses an unorthodox healing method that propels her into conflict with her overbearing father. Two golden oldie New Zealand shorts will also screen: Alison Maclean’s Kitchen Sink and Taika Waititi’s Two Cars, One Night [below] which both originally premiered in Sundance.
Overall, this year’s hybrid live-virtual programme features 82 feature-length films, 42 per cent of which are from first-time filmmakers. The festival has expanded the number of films from the roughly 70 it screened in 2021, but the number is far less than the 120 features it debuted in pre-pandemic times. The festival, which unfolds from January 20 to 30, will feature a line-up of films that were largely shot during COVID.
The Premieres section traditionally includes the more commercial films. These include Oliver Hermanus’s UK film Living starring Bill Nighy as a terminally ill public servant in Kazuo Ishiguro’s adaptation of Akira Kurasawa’s 1952 drama Ikiru; God’s Country starring Thandiwe Newton as a grieving college professor who confronts two hunters she catches trespassing on her property; Dark Stick written and directed by Lena Dunham about a young woman who begins an affair with her older employer; and Carol screenwriter Phyllis Nagy’s Call Jane set in 1968 Chicago, about a suburban housewife who, after having a life-saving secret abortion, seeks to give women access to safe abortions through an underground collective of women known as “Jane”. Interestingly, there is also a documentary on the same subject in the Documentary Competition called The Janes, which focuses on the 1972 arrest of seven women who built an underground network to get women safe abortions.
The latter two films should prove controversial at a time when the US Supreme Court is deciding the future of Roe vs. Wade.
A French film in the Spotlight programme, Audrey Diwan’s Happening, which won the Golden Lion in Venice, is another period drama about abortion access. The affable Diwan told us last week at the announcements of the nominations for the Lumiere prizes — where her film was widely nominated — that she is up to the task of talking up her film and its subject in Sundance. Diwan has been very public about having had an abortion herself.
Also from France, The Artist director Michel Hazanavicius will present Final Cut, his French-language remake of the innovative Japanese horror hit One Cut of the Dead [above]. It follows a film crew shooting a low-budget zombie movie when they are attacked by real zombies. The film’s star Romain Duris was excited about this when we spoke for Eiffel.
Still, the most attention-getting Sundance films are bound to be documentaries and two are from Netflix. The Kanye West three-part jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, which features never-before-seen footage over 21 years in the life of the controversial attention-grabbing rapper, directed by Clarence “Coodie” Simmons and Chike Ozah, two of West’s frequent collaborators. Hopefully they’ve managed to remain objective — Netflix snapped up the film in any case, for a reported US$30 million.
The other documentary Netflix has picked up is Downfall: The Case Against Boeing directed by Rory Kennedy (Last Days in Vietnam, Ghosts of Abu Ghraib), from Imagine Documentaries, an offshoot of Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment. It investigates the two Boeing 737 MAX crashes that killed 346 people, one in October 2018 on Lion Air and another on Ethiopian Airlines in March 2019 after which officials grounded the planes. While exploring the root causes and the human cost, the film is also a portrait of a crumbling corporate culture and a fierce indictment of Wall Street’s corrupting influence.
The doco we are most keen to see is comedian Amy Poehler’s tribute to Lucille Ball, Lucy And Desi [above], which comes hot on the heels of Amazon Studios’ Being The Ricardos starring Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem. The doco shows how Ball had an immense influence on the creation of TV syndication as she rose to become a true entrepreneur and multi-faceted mogul.
Then there’s the UK film The Princess, Ed Perkins’ look at the late Princess Diana that is certain to spark the wrath of the Royal Family. It’s produced by Simon and Jonathan Chinn, who brought us the recent docos on Tina Turner and Whitney Houston, so is bound to be impeccable in its research. W. Kamau Bell’s Bill Cosby docuseries We Need to Talk About Cosby, is likewise bound to create controversy.
Irish singer Sinead O’Connor is the subject of Nothing Compares which screens in the World Cinema Documentary section and focuses on her words and deeds from 1987 to 1993. The film reflects on the legacy of a fearless trailblazer through a contemporary feminist lens.
