Next month’s Sundance Film Festival returns with live premieres, with Anne Hathaway, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Julia Louis-Dreyfus starring in new films.
The Utah-based festival has been online since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and while this year’s festival was supposed to be a hybrid physical-digital festival, the rise of the Omicron variant meant it was canceled at the last minute. The 2023 edition will still have a digital portion, but a significant amount of the film will only be available on the ground.
Lady Macbeth director William Oldroyd will unveil his highly anticipated sequel, psychological thriller Eileen. Set in the 1960s, Thomasin McKenzie stars as a secretary who strikes up a friendship with a charismatic new counselor at the prison where she works, played by Anne Hesse Wei (Anne Hathaway) plays. But things take a dark turn when a secret is revealed. It is based on the acclaimed book by Otessa Moshfegh, shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor is also heading to the mountains with sci-fi comedy Generation Pod, starring him and Emilia Clarke as a couple who use technology to start a family through an artificial womb.
Nicole Holofcener, whose 2006 film “Rich Friends” opened the festival that year, will return with “You Hurt My Feelings,” the comedy Get her back with Enough Said’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus. The Veep star will play a novelist whose life is thrown into disarray when she overhears her husband criticizing her work.
An adaptation of Kristen Roupenian’s hit short story “Cat Person” will also premiere, with Coda’s Emilia Jones and Succession’s Nicholas Starring Nicholas Braun. “They kind of turned it into a thriller,” Jones said in an interview last year. Brandon Cronenberg will also return to the festival after 2020’s “Possessor,” starring Alexander Skarsgård and Mia Gort ( Mia Goth in the bloody resort horror flick Infinity Pool. Thoroughbreds director Cory Finley will premiere his new film, Landscape With Invisible Hand, starring Tiffany Haddish, about a future in which aliens take over and control the world’s economy.
Films in competition include bodybuilding drama Magazine Dreams starring Jonathan Majors, Suicidal Office Worker Sometimes I Want to Die, starring Daisy Ridley, and Bridgetown’s Phoebe Darnewall Directed relationship thriller Fair Play.
The festival will also see the premieres of a large selection of major documentaries. Victim/Suspect focuses on women who make allegations of sexual assault but are systematically abused and misrepresented, Food and Nation is about America’s broken food system, and Project C centers on a grassroots organization that helps women get access to abortion pills. Also There will be documentaries featuring such characters as Little Richard, Michael J. Fox, Judy Bloom and Brooke Shields.
Of the 101 films that will premiere this year, 53 percent will be directed by one or more female filmmakers and 45 percent will be directed by filmmakers of color.
“Providing an important venue for artists to express themselves, take risks and allow visionary stories to be told and entertained is clearly an important part of Sundance Institute,” said Robert Redford, founder and president of the Sundance Institute. responsibility.” “The festival continues to foster these values and connections through independent storytelling. We are honored to share the compelling work at this year’s festival from diverse perspectives and unique voices.”
The Sundance Film Festival will run from January 19-29.