By Ryan Lattanzio, Anne Thompson
The 2024 Sundance Film Festival is nearly a week behind us, but there’s still plenty to sift through as deals continue and premieres look for a home. This year’s edition showed great strength in documentaries, with Netflix already acquiring the likes of Russian daredevil doc “Skywalkers,” moving incarceration story “Daughters,” Will Ferrell documentary “Will & Harper,” Norwegian gaming portrait “Ibelin,” and more.
On this week’s episode of “Screen Talk,” Anne and Ryan recap the best of the fest and assess the life ahead for not only the festival’s documentary entries, but also winning narrative features like Jesse Eisenberg’s “A Real Pain.” Searchlight bought the moving dramedy about cousins on a Holocaust memorial trip, starring Eisenberg and “Succession” Emmy winner Kieran Culkin, for $10 million. The film, at least for now, should expect to be in the awards conversation later this year. (“A Real Pain” also topped IndieWire’s Sundance critics’ survey of the best films at the fest.) But that wasn’t the biggest narrative buy at the festival, as Netflix picked up the horror film “It’s What Inside” for $17 million.
We also review this year’s U.S. Dramatic competition winners, led by the coming-of-age portrait “In the Summers,” which won the Grand Jury and Directing prizes for first-time feature filmmaker Alessandra Lacorazza. That film, a somewhat unexpected choice given the muted word of mouth on the ground and the surprising robustness of the competition slate, is still without a U.S. distributor. The Audience Award winner, Sean Wang’s Taiwanese-American adolescence story “Didi,” was just bought by Focus Features. It’s a definite crowdpleaser that also ranked high on IndieWire’s poll in multiple categories.
We also talk our great efforts to score tickets to see Joni Mitchell at the Hollywood Bowl in LA this October. (Update: We got them.)
Forward to minute 10:30 for Gaucho Gaucho mention.