Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck remember the feeling of being the new kids at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2004, they showed up in Park City, Utah, armed with their short film Gowanus, Brooklyn. It won a prize that year, and enough support to make the long version, Half Nelsonwhich later earned Ryan Gosling his first Oscar nomination.
Film festivals like Sundance are places of discovery, where directors fresh out of film school can have an opportunity to make a breakthrough. Like many of their contemporaries who broke through at Sundance, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck later moved on to bigger projects, including Captain Marvel.
The premiere of their new film, Freaky Taleswill take place Thursday, as part of the opening evening of the 40e edition of the festival, at the legendary Eccles Theater.
As always, an army of celebrities is expected in Park City, including Kristen Stewart, with two films expected (Love Me And Love Lies Bleeding), Saoirse Ronan, Kieran Culkin, Sebastian Stan, Woody Harrelson and Aubrey Plaza.
The enthusiasm is not lost on Sundance stalwarts like Jesse Eisenberg, who has been attending the festival since the presentation of The Squid and the Whalein 2005. This year, he presents A Real Painwhich he wrote and directed, in which he plays an American who travels to Poland with his cousin to see where their late grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, came from.
The festival founded by Robert Redford is above all avant-garde, but this edition will take the time to highlight the most famous productions from Sundance over the last four decades.
Sundance programmers studied 17,435 applications to arrive at the 83 feature films screened over the 10 days of the 2024 edition.
The Sundance Film Festival will take place January 18-28.