Festival Predictions

2014 Sundance Film Festival Predictions: Maya Forbes’ Infinitely Polar Bear

Published on November 19, 2013

The scribe behind Monsters vs. Aliens and The Rocker would normally be the last person I’d associate with Sundance, much less the director’s chair…but sometimes it’s a question of who and what you know. Equipped with excellent technical folk such as cinematographer Bobby Bukowski and editor Michael R. Miller, Maya Forbes expands on a story inspired by personal events and is surrounded here with A listers Zoe Saldana and Mark Ruffalo. Shooting of Infinitely Polar Bear began back in April in Providence, Rhode Island, so logically this is in the clear for a festival showing and might be a high sale price.

Gist: Ruffalo plays a bipolar husband and father who goes off his medication, and then loses both his sanity and job while struggling to hold onto his marriage. Saldana would play his put-upon wife, who, after going back to work, ends up moving out of the house, leaving him with the kids.

Production Co./Producers: Sam Bisbee (Robot & Frank), Paper Street Films’s Bingo Gubelmann and Benji Kohn (Hello I Must Be Going), Plum Pictures’ Galt Niederhoffer

Prediction: U.S. Dramatic Competition or they’ll wait it out until TIFF.

U.S. Distributor: Rights Available

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Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).