Category: Festival

“I wish during the next hour and a half that each one of you will become an 11-year-old little girl,” Maïmouna Doucouré told the audience assembled at the Egyptian Theatre on opening night of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, before the curtain rose on her debut feature, Cuties.
Mission accomplished. Equal parts disturbing and joyous—just like being an 11-year-old girl, if my fairly distant recollections can be trusted—the French writer/director’s coming-of-age tale follows Amy, the daughter of Senegalese immigrants living in a Paris housing project, as she deals with the highs and lows of reaching that “not a girl, not yet a woman” age range.

Two years after he debuted his first feature film, Blindspotting, at the Sundance Film Festival, Carlos López Estrada returned with Summertime, a poetic odyssey through Los Angeles with more than 30 characters—including taggers, cooks, and would-be-rappers—through one hot, life-changing summer day.
At the Q&A after the screening, Estrada described the film, which was a collaboration with 27 young poets, as a “miracle movie.”
After attending a Get Lit teen poetry program seven months ago, Estrada said, “We saw these people talking about things that were important to them in a way that was creative and beautiful.

We get it—sometimes life gets in the way of you making it to Park City to attend the Sundance Film Festival in person. That’s why we provide plenty of ways that you can follow along with everything happening on the mountain over the next two weeks. Here at Sundance.

PARK CITY, UTAH — Sundance Institute today announced a first-of-its-kind collaboration with Sony Pictures Classics and Trafalgar Releasing: on January 26, the Utah premiere of The Climb, screening in the Spotlight category of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, will be simulcast across ten cinemas across the U.S., with the following Q&A simulcast live from The Ray Theatre in Park City, enabling independent film fans in markets nationwide to participate in the buzz of Festival from afar.

As always, during the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, we’ll be hosting a wide range of screenings, projects, and events at our five venues in Salt Lake City, located about 30 miles outside of the Festival’s home base in Park City. Below, we’ve rounded up everything you need to know about experiencing the Festival in SLC, complete with info on our venues, lounges, and box office. Note that individual tickets go on sale to the general public on January 21; in the meantime, you’ll want to look through our digital program guide’s schedule feature to see which films you can catch in Salt Lake City.

[Ed. note: Looking for updates from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival awards ceremony? Head here.]Updated 9:12 PM MTPalka introduces Rachel Grady, who along with co-director Heidi Ewing is an Academy Award nominee for the film Jesus Camp and has won numerous Emmy awards and a Peabody Award.

‘Brittany Runs a Marathon’By Jeremy Kinser
Writer-director Paul Downs Colaizzo calls his inspirational feature film debut Brittany Runs a Marathon “a love letter to my best friend.” He says he based the script on his pal of the same name, after becoming inspired by her journey as a New Yorker in her late 20s to overcome bad habits and establish some balance in her life and believing that her story needed to be shown with dignity on the big screen. The comedy has emerged as one of the bona-fide crowd pleasers of Sundance 2019 and global rights were snapped up by Amazon for $14 million.

Imaginary OrderBy Jeremy Kinser
Imaginary Order, a comedic character study from Debra Eisenstadt, focuses on a woman at a crossroads, beginning to feel useless as she finds herself in the middle of a series of unwanted events that threaten to unravel her family.
Veteran comic actress Wendi McLendon-Covey (known for more ribald work in Bridesmaids and TV’s The Goldbergs) gets the chance to create a funny, moving portrait of Cathy, a middle-aged housewife and mother who increasingly feels her comfortable existence is slipping away—and she scores. Cathy’s teenaged daughter is becoming increasingly remote, and she fears her husband is having an affair.

Hail Satan?By Eric Hynes
“I made a mainstream audience film that’s pro-satanism,” said filmmaker Penny Lane after a screening of her U.S. Documentary Competition entry Hail Satan? at the MARC Theater on Wednesday.

GazaBy Eric Hynes
An antidote to politically-tinged cable news representations, Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell’s Gaza is a visually ripe, kaleidoscopic portrait of everyday life in the Palestinian territory. From fishers to ambulance drivers, artists to patriarchs, old folks to young, Mediterranean beaches to embattled border walls, the filmmakers strive to represent the full spectrum of life in Gaza, and allow residents themselves to provide personal perspectives and narratives via voiceover. While they don’t shy away from moments of unrest and conflict, the filmmakers give context for expressions of frustration by people—several million strong—who are effectively permanently trapped and abandoned in a narrow strip of land.

With Late Night, out Indian-American director Nisha Ganatra chronicles Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson), a female late-night talk show host who has reached a crossroads in her career. Her appeal to the young demo is non-existent, her ratings have begun to slip, and her producer has informed her that she’ll be replaced by a decades-younger male shock jock.
In an impulsive move, she hires Molly (Mindy Kaling) to join her all-male writing staff in an effort to make her comedy more diverse.