I’m also eager to see Tessa Thompson in the period romance Sylvie’s Love, which costars NFL player turned actor Nnamdi Asomugha; his last Sundance film, Crown Heights, won the audience prize. Earnest romance is a genre that’s been largely relegated to teens-with-diseases movies of late, and while plenty of those movies are good, it would be nice to see a grown-up love story that really connects. Hopefully writer-director Eugene Ashe can deliver.
The Outsiders
Maybe the buzziest movie at Sundance this year is Zola, a film from Janicza Bravo, who cowrote the screenplay with hot-young-thing playwright Jeremy O. Harris. (His Slave Play has probably been the most talked-about play in New York for a year now.) They’re working with fascinating source material: Aziah King’s mega-viral Twitter thread about a wild road trip she took with a woman she barely knew. It will be fascinating to see how Twitter narrative translates to film language; it could be a disaster, or it could open the doors to a whole new form of adaptation.
Writer-filmmaker-many-things-else-r Miranda July hasn’t made a feature film in nine years, so her return to Sundance in 2020 feels long overdue. Only, did anyone think she would be coming back with a heist film? That’s what her new feature, Kajillionaire, is purported to be. Richard Jenkins, Evan Rachel Wood, and frickin’ Debra Winger play a family of thieves who involve a stranger, played by Gina Rodriguez, in their latest job. July’s aesthetic and philosophical idiosyncrasies ought to bring something interesting to the caper format, perhaps even wringing something profound out of all the whimsy—as July so often does.
The combination of an A24 pedigree, Brad Pitt as a producer, and Steven Yeun as a star has me thinking that Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari could be a Thing. Minari—about a Korean-American family moving to rural Arkansas—is Chung’s fourth film after his breakout debut, 2007’s festival smash Munyurangabo. The star power behind and in front of the camera, and A24’s support, could indicate that Minari will be another sensation, just the kind of thing that people travel to Sundance discover.
Farewell Amor could also fit that bill. Director Ekwa Msangi’s film concerns immigrants from Angola struggling to make sense of their bonds to one another while living in Brooklyn. It’s publicists’ job to do this, so take the following with a grain of salt, but: I have heard encouraging whispers about this film. Regardless of that pre-festival spin, it’s a promising entry, one that would mark a grand debut for Msangi.
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