Festival Predictions

2016 Sundance Film Festival Predictions: Wayne Roberts’ Katie Says Goodbye

Published on November 24, 2015

Take two thesps from the previous Sundance film festival who both broke out big and then pair them up for your directorial debut. This is the chance that was afforded to Wayne Roberts. Grand Jury Sundance winning Me and Earl and the Dying Girl‘s Olivia Cooke and NEXT section winning James White‘s Christopher Abbott were enlisted for Katie Says Goodbye back in March for the New Mexico production. Included on the Blacklist’s weekly top read scripts and described as a blend of coming-of-ager, a modern Western and the first part of a possible trilogy, this appears to visit some dark matter and tonally could be the antithesis of The Girlfriend Experience.

Gist: Katie (Cooke), a kindhearted seventeen-year-old turns to prostitution to overcome poverty and fulfill her dream of a new life in San Francisco.

Production Co./Producers: Producers: Tandem Pictures’ Jake Wasserman (Katie Says Goodbye) and Schuyler Weiss (The Sleepwalker), Max Born (James White), Relic Pictures’ Eric Schultz (The Fixer), Carlo Sirtori (The Preppie Connection), Benjamin Steiner. Executive producers: Borderline Films’ Sean Durkin, Antonio Campos and Josh Mond.

Prediction: U.S. Dramatic Comp.

U.S. Distributor: Rights Available. TBD (domestic). TBD (international)

[related]2016 Sundance Film Festival Predictions[/related]

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).