Sundance 2020 Recap: Awards & Acquisitions for WFF Alumni
Elisabeth Moss and Odessa Young in SHIRLEY. source: Sundance
The 2020 Sundance Film Festival has come to a close. With 128 feature films selected from over 15,000 submissions, this year’s lineup was a potent mix of socially inclined biopics, documentaries, and narratives from both emerging and established talents. In the mix were several films affiliated with friends and alumni of the Woodstock Film Festival, some of which later went on to pick up awards and be acquired by top tier distributors.
Leading the pack was documentarian Heidi Ewing’s narrative debut I CARRY YOU WITH ME, a tender love story about one chef’s decision to cross the dangerous U.S./Mexico border in order to escape the lack of economic opportunities and homophobia in his hometown. Premiering in the festival’s NEXT category, the film received the Audience Award: NEXT and NEXT Innovator Prize awards, later being acquired by Sony Picture Classics.
Next up was Josephine Decker’s SHIRLEY, which received the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award: Auteur Filmmaking. Starring Elisabeth Moss and produced by Woodstock Film Festival alum and honorary Maverick Award recipient Christine Vachon, the film follows a young couple who move in with an eccentric professor and his novelist wife, only to become unwitting subjects for the latter’s newest literary endeavor.
WELCOME TO CHECHNYA, Hudson Valley filmmaker David France’s harrowing new documentary about the ongoing LGBTQ+ human rights crisis in the Russian republic received the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Editing. The film uses groundbreaking new VFX technology to protect the identities of its subjects, setting a new technological precedent that others in the genre are sure to imitate. The film has been acquired by HBO.
WENDY, Woodstock Film Festival alum Benh Zeitlin’s follow up to 2012’s BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, was picked up by Fox Searchlight. A darkly imaginative reinvention of the classic Peter Pan story, the film is told from the perspective of a young girl who is whisked away with her brothers to an island of eternal childhood.
You can view all of the award recipients on the Sundance website here.