The full programme for this year’s Sundance Film Festival: London has been announced. The applauded Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, directed by Sundance alumna and Best Director winner (at Sundance Film Festival 2022), Sophie Hyde will open this year’s festival on 9th June. Lead actors Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack are confirmed to attend the premiere on 9th June, with the film also playing at cinemas across the UK as part of the second annual Festival Tour.
Closing the festival on 12th June is British filmmaker Jim Archer’s feature Brian and Charles. The feel-good comedy film stars British actor and comedian David Earl as Brian, a lonely and unlucky inventor who builds an artificial intelligence robot made from odds and ends, including an old washing machine.
Alongside the opening and closing night films, the festival will present a selection of remarkable and wide-ranging filmmaking. Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul is an American dark comedy satire written, directed and produced by Adamma Ebo in her directorial debut, and featuring a stellar cast that includes Regina Hall, Sterling K. Brown and Nicole Beharie. Andrew Semans’ psychological thriller Resurrection stars Rebecca Hall as Margaret, a woman who balances the demands of a busy career and single parenthood. Her carefully constructed life is upended when an unwelcome shadow from her past, David, played excellently by Tim Roth, returns, forcing her to confront the monster she’s evaded for two decades.
In addition, cinema-goers will be able to take in the impressive and tender A Love Song, directed by Max Walker-Silverman, which tells the story of two childhood sweethearts, now both widowed, reuniting after 40 years apart. Receiving its world premiere at the Festival in 2022, the bold and funny Sharp Stick is Lena Dunham’s long-awaited follow up to Tiny Furniture, and follows a naive 26-year-old living on the fringes of Hollywood who begins an affair with her older employer and is thrust into an education on lust, loss and power. Chloe Okuno’s debut psychological thriller, Watcher (Official Selection at the Sundance Film Festival 2022 U.S. Dramatic Competition), was shot during the pandemic and stars Maika Monroe as an expat being stalked.
As in previous years, the London edition will provide a strong documentary offering, which this year will be presented by Kia. Sara Dosa’s engrossing Fire of Love (winner of theJonathan Oppenheim Editing Award at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival), follows the lives and careers of Volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft and is narrated by Miranda July. British director Ed Perkins’ highly anticipated The Princess lets archive footage do the talking in this compelling and uncompromising documentary of Princess Diana’s story. Joe Hunting’s groundbreaking and immersive debut documentary feature, We Met in Virtual Reality,takes place entirely within the online platform VRChat. It explores the social relations developed by users of VRChat during the pandemic and how their lives were changed by their time on the platform. Julie Ha and Eugene Yi’s documentary, Free Chol Soo Lee, details a Korean immigrant’s wrongful conviction and doubles as a portrait of the brutality of incarceration. The film follows the intense issues that arise when it comes to racial profiling and how the Korean community rallied together to bring one man justice.
The 2022 Festival continues the Sundance tradition of supporting emerging voices in filmmaking. In addition to Adamma Ebo, Max Walker-Silverman and Joe Hunting’s debut features, the festival will also host Hanna Bergholm’s debut Hatching, an inventive Finnish horror. The film follows Tinja, a 12-year-old gymnast desperate to please her mother. After finding a wounded bird in the woods, Tinja brings a strange mop egg home and nurtures it until it hatches. The creature that emerges soon becomes her closest friend and a living nightmare, plunging Tinja into a twisted reality.
More as the festival draws nearer.
