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Jennifer, a globetrotting journalist and professor, lives an enviable life with her boyfriend in New York City. That is, until her mother finds a story Jennifer wrote at age 13 depicting a “special” relationship with two adult coaches. Reading the yellowed pages of “The Tale”, Jennifer discovers the coded details she composed 40 years earlier are quite unlike her recollection. Deeply shaken yet determined to square her version of events with the truth, she sets out to find her two coaches. Returning to the Carolina horse farm where so much transpired, Jennifer’s gangly yet tenacious seventh-grade self reawakens, and the loving stories she told herself for decades begin to unravel.
Seamlessly toggling between past and present, writer/director Jennifer Fox forges a fresh and uncompromising cinematic language to penetrate the heightened internal worlds of her character at two pivotal stages. Shocking, emotionally raw and destabilising, this investigative thriller punctures the insidious workings of unchecked power and lays bare the mechanisms of memory – refashioned over time by a growing girl in order to not only survive, but to prevail.
It’s 2018 – the need for discussions surrounding women filmmakers and Hollywood’s gender bias should have diminished by now. But within the first few moments of Half The Picture, it’s clear that discrimination against women filmmakers remains highly prevalent. This is a fundamental civil rights issue: women in the industry are not offered the same opportunities as their male counterparts.
Gender-parity experts and academics discuss Hollywood’s dismal employment practices, and these conversations are woven between interviews with a wealth of prominent women directors, who tell their stories of breaking into a male-centred business. They confirm the double standards that still exist while eloquently outlining their career paths, their struggles and their hopes for the future. First-time director Amy Adrion smartly deals with the inherent sexism in the industry and considers many of the stereotypes and biases that have prevented women from rising through the ranks. In the current political climate, and amid the recent cascade of sexual harassment allegations, the time to listen and act is now.
The Graham family starts to unravel following the death of their reclusive grandmother. Even after she’s gone, the matriarch still casts a dark shadow over the family, especially her loner teenage granddaughter, Charlie, whom she always had an unusual fascination with. As an overwhelming terror takes over their household, their peaceful existence is ripped apart, forcing their mother to explore a darker realm in order to escape the unfortunate fate they’ve inherited.
The feature-film debut of writer/director Ari Aster captivates the audience with a delicate and deliberate take on domestic turmoil, and it’s filled with haunting manifestations. Aster’s script ratchets up a feeling of delirious dread as the family members isolate themselves, only furthering their descent into madness. While consistently surprising in its twists and turns, this is a horror story firmly grounded within the desperate emotions of its compelling lead performances. Among a talented cast including Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff and Ann Dowd, the real standout is the menacing performance from young Broadway actress Milly Shapiro.
BFFs Angela (Maia Mitchell) and Jessie (Cami Morrone) are high-school dropouts working dead-end waitressing jobs in the same crappy diner. Their dream vacation to sunny Galveston, Texas is only a few shifts away. But after a drug deal goes bad and their home is invaded – which leads them to serve a short stint in juvenile detention – their beach trip is in serious jeopardy. They’ll have to use every bit of guile their perpetually buzzed teenage brains can muster as they try to get (relatively) rich quick while wandering suburban Dallas.
Augustine Frizzell directs her scrappy debut feature with infectious energy and style. Co-stars Mitchell and Morrone imbue Angela and Jessie with such gonzo charm and stoned drive that it’s impossible not to root for them, no matter how misguided their scheme may be. An eclectic supporting cast, featuring Saturday Night Live’s Kyle Mooney as the girls’ weirdo housemate, shines as they bounce around suburban purgatory in search of cash. Never Goin’ Back is an engaging shaggy-dog crime story for the Snapchat generation.
A 91-minute theatrical program of seven short films selected from this year’s Festival, widely considered the premier showcase for short films and the launchpad for many now-prominent independent filmmakers for more than 30 years. Including fiction, documentary and animation from around the world, the 2018 program offers new audiences a taste of what the Festival offers, from laugh-out-loud comedy to contemplative reflections of the world we live in.
Baby Brother (Director: Kamau Bilal)
The director’s baby brother moves back in with his parents.
The Burden (Director: Niki Lindroth von Bahr)
A dark musical enacted in a modern shopping center, situated next to a large freeway. The employees of the various commercial venues deal with boredom and existential anxiety by performing cheerful musical turns. The apocalypse is a tempting liberator.
Fauve (Director: Jérémy Comte)
Set in a surface mine, two boys sink into a seemingly innocent power game with Mother Nature as the sole observer.
Hair Wolf (Director: Mariama Diallo)
In a black hair salon in gentrifying Brooklyn, the local residents fend off a strange new monster: white women intent on sucking the lifeblood from black culture.
JEOM (Director: Kangmin Kim)
A father and a son both have the same big birthmark on their butt. Believing that the two birthmarks are connected, the son scrubs his father’s birthmark to remove it – but he just can’t get rid of it.
Matria (Director: Álvaro Gago)
Faced with a challenging daily routine, Ramona tries to take refuge in her relationships with her daughter and granddaughter.
Maude (Director: Anna Margaret Hollyman)
Teeny thought it was just another routine babysitting job – until she’s shocked to meet the client. As the day goes on, Teeny decides to become the woman she had no idea she always wanted to be…until she gets caught.
Panelists: Amy Adrion, director of Half the Picture; Jordan McGarry, Head of Production for Film London; Eva Yates, Commissioning Executive at BBC Films.
Coinciding with the festival’s #WhatNext theme, this vital event sees key industry players take the stage to examine what must be done to create a new cultural landscape that is more inclusive and representative. Representatives of the UK’s major film funders, Film London, BBC Films and Sundance, will speak alongside Amy Adrion, whose film Half The Picture explores the hiring of film and television directors in Hollywood and features Ava DuVernay (A Wrinkle in Time), Lena Dunham (Girls), Jill Soloway (Transparent) and Rosanna Arquette.
On a hot night in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1973, Jerry Dread stops the music at an outdoor party to encourage a truce between warring gangs. His little brother Denis looks on from the crowd as an assassin’s bullet rings out, taking Jerry’s life. A decade later, Denis is the right-hand man to gang boss Fox, who sends him on a loyalty-testing mission to London. But when the mission goes wrong, Denis hides out with an old flame and decides to find his brother’s killer.
Based on the cult novel by Victor Headley, Idris Elba’s standout directorial debut fuses the hard-boiled gangster genre with a dramatic coming-of-age period piece, bringing to life characters who struggle to find forgiveness while making their own paths between two worlds. Elba expertly re-creates the atmosphere of the times with an astute eye for detail and an evocative soundtrack that captures the tumultuous spirit of Kingston and London in the ’80s – where identity, culture and even the cities themselves were in flux.
After being fired by her scheming husband Shane Danger (Emile Hirsch) from his cappuccino shop, dissatisfied Lulu Danger (Aubrey Plaza) is stunned when a TV commercial for “An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn For One Magical Night Only” reveals a mysterious man from her past (Craig Robinson). When Shane and his bumbling cohorts steal the cashbox from Lulu’s adopted vegan brother Adjay, specialist Colin (Jemaine Clement) enters the fray to retrieve the stolen funds. But Lulu seizes the opportunity to run off in search of her mystery man – and events only become stranger from there.
Filmmaker Jim Hosking (The Greasy Strangler) makes his triumphant return to the Festival, bringing his innate talent for outrageous absurdity to the romantic comedy genre while pushing the boundaries of storytelling into the wild unknown of outsider art. Throwing a fine cast of comedic favourites into places of great daring, and with a spirited sense of timing and unexpected emotion, Hosking and the contents of his fevered brain produce a kind of cinema like no other.
Eighth-grader Kayla Day always has her phone in hand, hoping to find connections online that might make up for those she’s unable to forge in everyday life. She makes YouTube videos aimed at other adolescents dealing with similar issues – feelings of isolation, anxiety and invisibility. But after so easily summoning this wisdom and confidence when addressing her (barely existent) audience, Kayla finds it paralysingly difficult to apply in real situations. In the final week of a disastrous school year – and with high school looming on the horizon – Kayla struggles to bridge the gap between how she perceives herself and who she believes she should be.
Making his feature-film debut, writer/director Bo Burnham delivers a keenly observed and achingly funny portrait of the insecurities and absurdities of being 13 in a world where one’s private experience is lived publicly online. While Eighth Grade depicts the seeming impossibility of making it through middle school alive, it also celebrates the debut of its star, Elsie Fisher, whose dynamic portrayal feels both incredibly specific and heartbreakingly universal.
Introverted 18-year-old skateboarder Camille lives on Long Island with her single mother. After a startling injury, she promises her mother she’ll hang up her board, but the pull to skate is too strong. On Instagram she discovers “The Skate Kitchen”, a subculture of girls whose lives revolve around skating, and bravely seeks them out. The sexually fluid, rambunctious big-city girls quickly adopt the naive Camille as part of their gang, and soon they’re featuring her in trick videos and exposing her to a wild life she’s never experienced. For the first time, she feels acceptance and support from other girls. However, she soon learns the complexity of friendship when she befriends a boy from a rival group of skaters.
Writer/director Crystal Moselle (The Wolfpack) immersed herself in the lives of the skater girls and worked closely with them, resulting in the film’s authenticity, which combines poetic, atmospheric filmmaking and hypnotic skating sequences. Skate Kitchen precisely captures the experience of women in male-dominated spaces and tells a story of a girl who learns the importance of camaraderie and self-discovery.
Triple Threat – Three Major Filmmakers In Conversation
Panelists: Jennifer Fox, director/screenwriter of The Tale; Debra Granik, director/co-screenwriter of Leave No Trace; Desiree Akhavan, director/co-screenwriter of The Miseducation of Cameron Post.
Join three of the festival’s leading filmmakers for an insightful discussion of their careers and filmmaking processes. Jennifer Fox (The Tale) is joined by Debra Granik (Leave No Trace), Oscar-nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for the critically lauded Winter’s Bone (winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival), and 2018 Grand Jury prize-winning Desiree Akhavan (The Miseducation Of Cameron Post), writer, director and star of Appropriate Behaviour. A must-see masterclass.
Over the past 25 years, Lauren Greenfield’s documentary photography and film projects have explored youth culture, gender, body image and affluence. In this fascinating meld of career retrospective and film essay, Greenfield offers a meditation on her extensive body of work, structuring it through the lens of materialism and its increasing sway on culture and society in America and throughout the world. Underscoring the ever-increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots, her portraits reveal a focus on cultivating image over substance, where subjects unable to attain actual wealth instead settle for its trappings, no matter their ability to pay for it.
From her earliest photo studies of the seemingly privileged lives of Los Angeles high-school students, through her look at the pitfalls of extreme wealth in The Queen of Versailles (U.S. Documentary Directing Award, 2012 Sundance Film Festival), to more recent images of conspicuous consumption in Russia and China, Greenfield’s work becomes a cautionary morality tale about our unquenchable desire for more.
Cameron Post (Chloë Grace Moretz) looks the part of a perfect high-school girl. But after she’s caught with another girl in the back seat of a car on prom night, Cameron is quickly shipped off to a conversion therapy centre that treats teens “struggling with same-sex attraction”. At the facility, Cameron is subjected to outlandish discipline, dubious “de-gaying” methods and earnest Christian rock songs – but this unusual setting also provides her with an unlikely gay community. For the first time, she connects with peers and is able to find her place among fellow outcasts.
Writer/director Desiree Akhavan (Appropriate Behavior) and co-writer Cecilia Frugiuele sensitively adapt Emily Danforth’s acclaimed coming-of-age novel and create a refreshingly original teen movie. Balancing inherent drama with understated humour, The Miseducation Of Cameron Post looks at a teenage girl grappling with pain and loss who, at the same time, creates a family on her own terms and learns what it means to empower herself by having confidence in her own identity.
Jennifer, a globetrotting journalist and professor, lives an enviable life with her boyfriend in New York City. That is, until her mother finds a story Jennifer wrote at age 13 depicting a “special” relationship with two adult coaches. Reading the yellowed pages of “The Tale”, Jennifer discovers the coded details she composed 40 years earlier are quite unlike her recollection. Deeply shaken yet determined to square her version of events with the truth, she sets out to find her two coaches. Returning to the Carolina horse farm where so much transpired, Jennifer’s gangly yet tenacious seventh-grade self reawakens, and the loving stories she told herself for decades begin to unravel.
Seamlessly toggling between past and present, writer/director Jennifer Fox forges a fresh and uncompromising cinematic language to penetrate the heightened internal worlds of her character at two pivotal stages. Shocking, emotionally raw and destabilising, this investigative thriller punctures the insidious workings of unchecked power and lays bare the mechanisms of memory – refashioned over time by a growing girl in order to not only survive, but to prevail.
A showcase of visionary new shorts from the UK. A wild ride through fiction and animation, discovering some of the exciting new filmmaking talent in the country.
Blue Christmas (Director: Charlotte Wells)
On Christmas Eve, 1968, in a Scottish coastal town, a debt collector goes to work to avoid confronting his wife’s worsening psychosis at home.
Fry-Up (Director: Charlotte Regan)
An intimate portrayal of what could be a family’s last day together, set against the urban backdrop of North London.
Garfield (Director: Georgi Banks-Davies)
Krishna wakes up in a strange place, with a strange guy. As she pieces together how she got there, she realizes that the reasons may be bigger than just the night before.
Marfa (Directors: Greg McLeod, Myles McLeod)
An isolated town in the Texas borderlands. A place out of time. A shrine to minimalist art. Home to a remote festival. A place where unexplained lights tremble in the night sky. And then there’s the giant lemon.
[O] (Directors: Mario Radev, Chiara Sgatti)
A film that imitates nature in its manner of operation, depicting animated cycles in a world entirely based on sound frequency and vibration.
The Right Choice (Director: Tomisin Adepeju, Screenwriter: Vijay Varman)
With the help of an adviser, a husband and wife must answer three seemingly harmless questions to create their perfect designer baby.
Wren Boys (Director: Harry Lighton)
On the day after Christmas, a Catholic priest from Cork drives his nephew to prison.
After being fired by her scheming husband Shane Danger (Emile Hirsch) from his cappuccino shop, dissatisfied Lulu Danger (Aubrey Plaza) is stunned when a TV commercial for “An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn For One Magical Night Only” reveals a mysterious man from her past (Craig Robinson). When Shane and his bumbling cohorts steal the cashbox from Lulu’s adopted vegan brother Adjay, specialist Colin (Jemaine Clement) enters the fray to retrieve the stolen funds. But Lulu seizes the opportunity to run off in search of her mystery man – and events only become stranger from there.
Filmmaker Jim Hosking (The Greasy Strangler) makes his triumphant return to the Festival, bringing his innate talent for outrageous absurdity to the romantic comedy genre while pushing the boundaries of storytelling into the wild unknown of outsider art. Throwing a fine cast of comedic favourites into places of great daring, and with a spirited sense of timing and unexpected emotion, Hosking and the contents of his fevered brain produce a kind of cinema like no other.
Eighth-grader Kayla Day always has her phone in hand, hoping to find connections online that might make up for those she’s unable to forge in everyday life. She makes YouTube videos aimed at other adolescents dealing with similar issues – feelings of isolation, anxiety and invisibility. But after so easily summoning this wisdom and confidence when addressing her (barely existent) audience, Kayla finds it paralysingly difficult to apply in real situations. In the final week of a disastrous school year – and with high school looming on the horizon – Kayla struggles to bridge the gap between how she perceives herself and who she believes she should be.
Making his feature-film debut, writer/director Bo Burnham delivers a keenly observed and achingly funny portrait of the insecurities and absurdities of being 13 in a world where one’s private experience is lived publicly online. While Eighth Grade depicts the seeming impossibility of making it through middle school alive, it also celebrates the debut of its star, Elsie Fisher, whose dynamic portrayal feels both incredibly specific and heartbreakingly universal.
Introverted 18-year-old skateboarder Camille lives on Long Island with her single mother. After a startling injury, she promises her mother she’ll hang up her board, but the pull to skate is too strong. On Instagram she discovers “The Skate Kitchen”, a subculture of girls whose lives revolve around skating, and bravely seeks them out. The sexually fluid, rambunctious big-city girls quickly adopt the naive Camille as part of their gang, and soon they’re featuring her in trick videos and exposing her to a wild life she’s never experienced. For the first time, she feels acceptance and support from other girls. However, she soon learns the complexity of friendship when she befriends a boy from a rival group of skaters.
Writer/director Crystal Moselle (The Wolfpack) immersed herself in the lives of the skater girls and worked closely with them, resulting in the film’s authenticity, which combines poetic, atmospheric filmmaking and hypnotic skating sequences. Skate Kitchen precisely captures the experience of women in male-dominated spaces and tells a story of a girl who learns the importance of camaraderie and self-discovery.
Over the past 25 years, Lauren Greenfield’s documentary photography and film projects have explored youth culture, gender, body image and affluence. In this fascinating meld of career retrospective and film essay, Greenfield offers a meditation on her extensive body of work, structuring it through the lens of materialism and its increasing sway on culture and society in America and throughout the world. Underscoring the ever-increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots, her portraits reveal a focus on cultivating image over substance, where subjects unable to attain actual wealth instead settle for its trappings, no matter their ability to pay for it.
From her earliest photo studies of the seemingly privileged lives of Los Angeles high-school students, through her look at the pitfalls of extreme wealth in The Queen of Versailles (U.S. Documentary Directing Award, 2012 Sundance Film Festival), to more recent images of conspicuous consumption in Russia and China, Greenfield’s work becomes a cautionary morality tale about our unquenchable desire for more.
It’s 2018 – the need for discussions surrounding women filmmakers and Hollywood’s gender bias should have diminished by now. But within the first few moments of Half The Picture, it’s clear that discrimination against women filmmakers remains highly prevalent. This is a fundamental civil rights issue: women in the industry are not offered the same opportunities as their male counterparts.
Gender-parity experts and academics discuss Hollywood’s dismal employment practices, and these conversations are woven between interviews with a wealth of prominent women directors, who tell their stories of breaking into a male-centred business. They confirm the double standards that still exist while eloquently outlining their career paths, their struggles and their hopes for the future. First-time director Amy Adrion smartly deals with the inherent sexism in the industry and considers many of the stereotypes and biases that have prevented women from rising through the ranks. In the current political climate, and amid the recent cascade of sexual harassment allegations, the time to listen and act is now.
For years Will and his teenage daughter, Tom, have lived off the grid, blissfully undetected by authorities in a vast nature reserve on the edge of Portland, Oregon. When a chance encounter blows their cover, they’re removed from their camp and put in the charge of social services. Struggling to adapt to their new surroundings, Will and Tom set off on a perilous journey back to the wilderness, where they’re finally forced to confront conflicting desires – a longing for community versus a fierce need to live apart.
With Leave No Trace, Debra Granik proves once again that she’s an extraordinary filmmaker and a beacon for actors. Ben Foster is exceptional as Will, and with Tom, Granik again displays her singular knack for finding a relatively unknown actress and entrusting her with the role of a lifetime. Granik did it with Winter’s Bone (her 2010 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize winner), which starred a then-unknown Jennifer Lawrence. The similarly dazzling newcomer Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie is radiant as Tom, a girl coming of age in atypical circumstances.
BFFs Angela (Maia Mitchell) and Jessie (Cami Morrone) are high-school dropouts working dead-end waitressing jobs in the same crappy diner. Their dream vacation to sunny Galveston, Texas is only a few shifts away. But after a drug deal goes bad and their home is invaded – which leads them to serve a short stint in juvenile detention – their beach trip is in serious jeopardy. They’ll have to use every bit of guile their perpetually buzzed teenage brains can muster as they try to get (relatively) rich quick while wandering suburban Dallas.
Augustine Frizzell directs her scrappy debut feature with infectious energy and style. Co-stars Mitchell and Morrone imbue Angela and Jessie with such gonzo charm and stoned drive that it’s impossible not to root for them, no matter how misguided their scheme may be. An eclectic supporting cast, featuring Saturday Night Live’s Kyle Mooney as the girls’ weirdo housemate, shines as they bounce around suburban purgatory in search of cash. Never Goin’ Back is an engaging shaggy-dog crime story for the Snapchat generation.
Following on from last year's first ever surprise film, the hit rap story Patti Cake$, Sundance Film Festival: London will again feature a surprise showing. We can't reveal any details, but it was a favourite among audiences in Utah, and with just one screening this will be among the hottest of the hot tickets. The title will be revealed only when the opening credits roll. Don't miss out.
Art of the Real – The Intersection between Documentary and Fiction, hosted by The Doc Society
Panelists: Jennifer Fox, director/screenwriter of The Tale; Lauren Greenfield, director of Generation Wealth; Crystal Moselle, director/co-screenwriter of Skate Kitchen. Hosted by Lisa-Marie Russo of The Doc Society.
Three leading documentary and narrative filmmakers discuss the relationship between Documentary and Fiction filmmaking and how these boundaries can be blurred when the limits of traditional filmmaking are transcended. Following a successful career in documentary filmmaking, Jennifer Fox makes her narrative feature debut with The Tale, bringing her unique approach to documentary filmmaking to the autobiographically inspired story of sexual abuse. Lauren Greenfield joins the discussion as a distinguished documentary filmmaker boasting wins at both Sundance Film Festival and River Run Festival in 2012 for her riches-to-rags documentary, Queen of Versailles. This year sees Greenfield’s return to filmmaking with her examination of consumer capitalism: Generation Wealth. Completing the line-up is Crystal Moselle, best known for her U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize-winning feature The Wolfpackat the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, who brings true authenticity to her narrative debut, Skate Kitchen.
Cameron Post (Chloë Grace Moretz) looks the part of a perfect high-school girl. But after she’s caught with another girl in the back seat of a car on prom night, Cameron is quickly shipped off to a conversion therapy centre that treats teens “struggling with same-sex attraction”. At the facility, Cameron is subjected to outlandish discipline, dubious “de-gaying” methods and earnest Christian rock songs – but this unusual setting also provides her with an unlikely gay community. For the first time, she connects with peers and is able to find her place among fellow outcasts.
Writer/director Desiree Akhavan (Appropriate Behavior) and co-writer Cecilia Frugiuele sensitively adapt Emily Danforth’s acclaimed coming-of-age novel and create a refreshingly original teen movie. Balancing inherent drama with understated humour, The Miseducation Of Cameron Post looks at a teenage girl grappling with pain and loss who, at the same time, creates a family on her own terms and learns what it means to empower herself by having confidence in her own identity.
On a hot night in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1973, Jerry Dread stops the music at an outdoor party to encourage a truce between warring gangs. His little brother Denis looks on from the crowd as an assassin’s bullet rings out, taking Jerry’s life. A decade later, Denis is the right-hand man to gang boss Fox, who sends him on a loyalty-testing mission to London. But when the mission goes wrong, Denis hides out with an old flame and decides to find his brother’s killer.
Based on the cult novel by Victor Headley, Idris Elba’s standout directorial debut fuses the hard-boiled gangster genre with a dramatic coming-of-age period piece, bringing to life characters who struggle to find forgiveness while making their own paths between two worlds. Elba expertly re-creates the atmosphere of the times with an astute eye for detail and an evocative soundtrack that captures the tumultuous spirit of Kingston and London in the ’80s – where identity, culture and even the cities themselves were in flux.
Two recent works and one world premiere showcase the contemporary face of the Royal Ballet.
The contemporary face of The Royal Ballet is shown in works from three of today’s leading choreographers. Christopher Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour is based around seven couples separating and intermingling, to music by Vivaldi and Bosso and lit with rich colours suggested by sunset. Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern, revived for the first time, uses a large dance ensemble and Górecki’s familiar music from his Symphony of Sorrowful Songsfor a poignant and passionate reflection on migration. Between them, a new work by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, created on The Royal Ballet has its premiere to bring the contemporary truly up-to-date.
