Emilia Clarke kicks off the Sundance Film Festival

(Park City) Star of Game Of Thrones Emilia Clarke kicked off the Sundance festival, which made its big post-pandemic comeback on Thursday, bringing independent filmmakers and Hollywood stars to the mountains of Utah for the first time in three years.

Co-founded by actor Robert Redford, whose absence was felt, the event is held until January 29 in a resort at an altitude of more than 2000 meters. It is an essential launch pad for many independent films and documentaries.

“It’s my very first Sundance. So I’m glad everyone is as excited as I am,” said Emilia Clarke, who presented alongside actor Chiwetel Ejio for the film. The Pod Generationa social satire set in the near future, where a company has invented a detachable “womb”, allowing couples to share their pregnancies.

“It is also (a meeting) very important for independent cinema. We have to keep him alive,” she told AFP.

After two online editions, Sundance is now the last major film festival to return to a classic format. About 110 films share the bill this year.

“It’s very exciting to be back,” festival director Joana Vicente said at a press conference on Thursday.

“It’s a bit surreal to be back,” director Nicole Newnham – whose previous documentary Crip Camp: the cripple revolutionnominated for the Oscars, had made its debut during the last physical edition of the festival, in 2020.

female sexuality

His latest project, The Disappearance of Shere Hiteretraces the forgotten story of the author of the “Hite Report”, a pioneering study on female sexuality which sold millions of copies, but triggered a violent misogynist reaction.

This year, “the fact that there are so many films about women’s sexuality and women’s issues is really encouraging,” observes the director.

Among the other documentaries dealing with this theme, Judy Blume Forever notably tells how this American author introduced a generation of young girls to puberty and sex, but was attacked by conservative activists. And Pretty Baby deals with the hypersexualization of young women, focusing on the case of model Brooke Shields.

Documentaries are traditionally the cornerstone of the festival.

One of the most anticipated is Deep Rising. Narrated by Hawaiian actor Jason Momoa, it will dissect Friday the worrying race for mining the seabed in search of rare metals useful for batteries.

Ukrainian and Iranian women are also in the spotlight.

Iron Butterflies examines the crash of flight MH17, shot down in 2014 by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine, and links the lack of consequences for those responsible to the current war. Conflict is the subject of 20 Days in Mariupol.

The very personal Jonam follows three generations of women from the Iranian family of director Sierra Urich. Feature films The Persian Version and Shayda also explore the stories of women in Iran and its diaspora, as the country is rocked by major protests.

Hollywood stars

On the fiction side, Sundance focuses mainly on low and medium budget films. But dozens of Hollywood stars will make the trip for a number of previews.

Actress Emilia Jones returns to the festival, where she was first spotted in the film CODAthe Oscar-winning adaptation of the French film The Aries family.

She plays this time in two new feature films: CatPersonadapted from a famous short story New Yorkerand fairylandbased on a bestselling book about the AIDS crisis in San Francisco.

For many films, the challenge of this festival is to find buyers among the major American studios, in order to be widely distributed. But the bidding could be cut short: giants such as Netflix and Warner Bros are currently imposing budget cuts on themselves, after having spent unlimitedly to inflate their offer of streaming.

In this context, the directors could once again become the real stars of the event. Many of them come from the “Sundance sector” and present their first feature film, after discovering the festival with a short.