This is the fantasy thriller Nanny, centered on an undocumented nanny working for a wealthy New York family, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance American Independent Film Festival on Friday.
Starring Anna Diop and Michelle Monaghan, this feature debut from director Nikyatu Jusu chronicles the sacrifices of Aisha, a Senegalese nanny who leaves her country and her young son behind to try to build a new life for herself in the United States. United.
“Particularly in the United States, we haven’t seen enough movies reflecting the disproportionate amount of black and colored women who are the domestic workers running the country.“, had launched Nikyatu Jusu during the festival which took place again this year in a completely virtual way because of the pandemic.
“I wanted to focus on women who are usually relegated to the periphery in other women’s stories.“, explained the American director, whose parents are from Sierra Leone. Actress Anna Diop, also known for the television series Titans, was born in Senegal and moved to the United States when she was still a child.
Nanny, which explores the codes of horror film, African folklore as well as the question of race and motherhood, does not yet have a release date.
Among the many other prizes awarded on Friday by this festival co-founded by actor Robert Redford, is notably The Exiles, documentary prize, in which a documentary filmmaker tracks down three Chinese dissidents who fled after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989.
The audience award went to the feature film Cha Cha Real Smooth with Dakota Johnson and Cooper Raiff, who is also the screenwriter and director. The film was bought by Apple TV+ during the festival for $15 million, the biggest deal signed this year at Sundance.
Navalny, documentary devoted to the main Russian political opponent Alexeï Navalny, now imprisoned, who had been added in extremis to the programming, was also rewarded with the public prize awarded to an American documentary. Its director Daniel Roher stressed that he wanted his film to spark a movement “global protest“on the fate of the opponent.
The film, broadcast by CNN and HBO Max, follows Alexei Navalny, as well as his family and collaborators, during the five months spent in Germany recovering from a poisoning which almost won him in 2020.I want this name to be associated with a grotesque injustice perpetrated by the Russian state against a man who survived an attempted murder and was later arrested for simply surviving“, launched the director Daniel Roher.