Festival Predictions

2018 Sundance Film Festival Predictions: Josephine Decker’s Movie No. 1

Published on November 15, 2017

Part of the new wave of idiosyncratic female auteur voices (Sophia Takal, Sarah Adina Smith, Janicza Bravo, Chloé Zhao and Eliza Hittman come to mind), the one-two karate chop in the shape of Butter on the Latch and Thou Wast Mild and Lovely got this American indie fan’s knickers in a knot. At the last Sundance edition (New Frontier Lab), British born Josephine Decker created a virtual reality companion piece to the her third fiction film which went into production in September of 2016. While we await Movie No. 1 (which stars Molly Parker, Miranda July and newcomer Helena Howard), look out the Tribeca Film Festival selected Flames (2017).

Gist: This follows an ambitious theater director (Parker) who begins to weave the troubled interior life of her young star (Howard) into her new play. But when the teen actor takes the performance offstage, the question of who is directing whose life begins.

Production Co./Producers: Krista Parris and Elizabeth Rao.

Prediction: The NEXT section.

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

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).