Alfred P. Sloan Foundation & Sundance Institute Name ‘Pod Generation’ Best Feature Film

EXCLUSIVE: Cohen Media Group has acquired all North American distribution rights to filmmaker Mark Cousins’ Alfred Hitchcock doc My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock.

Stacey Solomon fans think she's told fans the name of her unborn baby by accident.

Dutch-born filmmaker Malou Reymann picked up the Dragon Award for Best Nordic Film at the Göteborg Film Festival Saturday evening with her second feature Unruly.

EXCLUSIVE: Hot off the heels of their Sundance premiere of Rye Lane, writers Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia have teamed up with Vertigo Films for their next romantic comedy The Whole Hog. 

Greenwich Entertainment has picked up all rights excluding TV to the documentary Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV, directed and produced by Amanda Kim, which world premiered in U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. 

EXCLUSIVE: The Sundance Institute and Peter Luo’s Stars Collective (Crazy Rich Asians, Midway, Marshall, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark) have partnered on the new Imagination Award that grants $25,000 each to three metaverse-based projects that show innovation “in a rapidly evolving mediascape.”

Lance Kerwin, the former child actor who shot to fame in the late 1970s as the star of the sometimes controversial NBC teen drama series James at 15, died of undetermined causes Tuesday in San Clemente, California. He was 62.

Angus MacLachlan wrote 2005’s terrific indie Junebug, which put Amy Adams on the big-time map and earned her a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination in a heartbreaking performance. It also put MacLachlan on the map with his first screenplay, and it was an auspicious start. Since then he has added directing to his credits including Goodbye to All and Abundant Acreage Available but tonight returned to the Sundance Film Festival with his latest, A Little Prayer, shot and set in his hometown of Winston-Salem, NC.

The Sundance Institute has named Caroline Monnet as the recipient of the 2023 Merata Mita Fellowship.

Maryam Keshavarz, Noora Niasari and Sierra Urich have films at Sundance this year, two narrative features and a doc, wrenching and joyful family stories of the Iranian diaspora threaded with longing, regret and rebellion. None deal with ongoing civil unrest there, but it colors the filmmakers’ work and life.  

Sundance U.S. dramatic competition jury members — including Marlee Matlin– chose to leave after the festival fell short of providing proper captioning for deaf and hearing impaired audience members during the Eccles Theatre premiere of Magazine Dreams last night.

Sony Pictures Classics present Florian Zeller’s The Son on 554 screens, an emotional family drama that folllows the director’s 2020 Oscar-winning The Father. As with that film, The Son is adapted from Zeller’s own stage play along with Christopher Hampton. Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby, Zen McGrath and Anthony Hopkins star in the cautionary tale of a family struggling to reunite,

If you’ve ever found yourself having misgivings about Siri or Alexa or some other personification of Artificial Intelligence taking a troubling interest in your life, the opening minutes of Sophie Barthes’ “The Pod Generation” may well give you the creeps. In a matter of minutes, as Rachel (“Game of Thrones” star Emilia Clarke) gets up and goes about her morning routine, we meet an AI household that talks to her, tests her levels (from blood to bliss), suggests an outfit for the day and tries to talk her into getting out more.

“We can’t live in the past!” Rachel (Emilia Clarke) tells her husband Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor).  “Things are evolving!” She should know; she spends her days creating AI companions and coordinating automation (her latest big triumph appears to be a combination of virtual assistant, friend, and mood ring). But Alvy, as she puts it, “studies plants… and plant-like things,” taking horticulture students out to fig trees and saying things like, “The texture is completely different when it’s fresh from the tree.” READ MORE: 25 Most Anticipated Films At The Sundance Film Festival So it’s a real opposites-attract situation, the old-school luddite and the literal creator of artificiality, and there are therefore obvious disagreements over her rather unilateral decision to take advantage of her company’s offer to set her up at “The Womb Center” (“It is our hottest perk – we we just want to retain the best and brightest women”).

Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor star in The Pod Generation written and directed by Sophie Barthes, and starts with Rachel (Clarke) imagining she’s pregnant–but it was just a dream. Her smart home helps her begin the day with 3D printing toast, making coffee, and picking her outfit for the day. Her husband Alvy (Ejiofor) is a bit more grounded. He’s a botanist and professor who encourages his wife and his students to reconnect with nature. Rachel hasn’t told her husband that she’s on the waiting list for Pegazus womb clinic (a place that grows babies in pod eggs), and her consultation date is finally arriving.

At today’s opening day Sundance press, Director of Programming, Kim Yutani announced the addition of Doug Liman’s first documentary, Justice, about Brett Kavanaugh.