Festival Predictions

2018 Sundance Film Festival Predictions: Nicole Holofcener’s The Land of Steady Habits

Published on November 15, 2017

She has been a fixture as a creative advisor, panelist and helmer who up until Toronto preemed Enough Said (2013) saw every single one of her films preem at the fest from her 1991 short film Angry to 2010’s Please Give with Walking and Talking (Sundance ’96), Lovely & Amazing (Sundance ’01) to Friends with Money (Sundance ’06). After half decade’s worth of television gigs (Parks and Recreation, Orange Is the New Black), Nicole Holofcener should be back at the fest The Land of Steady Habits. Starring Ben Mendelsohn, Elizabeth Marvel, Charlie Tahan (featured in our Trading Cards series), Edie Falco, Connie Britton and Thomas Mann. Netflix got onboard the project and grab worldwide rights, filming took place somewhere around the month of March in a village called Tarrytown in the state of New York.

Gist: Based on ‘The Land of Steady Habits’ by Ted Thompson, Anders Hill is finally ready to reap the rewards of a sensible life. Into his mid fifties and newly retired, his grown son’s college tuitions paid in full, Anders decides he’s had enough of steady habits: he leaves his wife, buys a condo, and waits for freedom to transform him. Stripped of the comforts of his previous identity, Anders embarks on a clumsy, and heartbreaking journey to reconcile his past with his present.

Production Co./Producers: Likely Story‘s Anthony Bregman and Stefanie Azpiazu (Private Life).

Prediction: Premieres.

U.S. Distributor: Netflix.

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).