Festival Predictions

2019 Sundance Film Festival Predictions: #99. Alistair Banks Griffin – The Wolf Hour

Published on November 23, 2018

Shooting took place in November of 2017 on Alistair Banks Griffin‘s sophomore feature and a cast of Naomi Watts, Jennifer Ehle, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Emory Cohen, Brennan Brown and Jeremy Bobb to boot. The Wolf Hour was at Sundance’s 2016 January Screenwriters Lab. Griffin reteams with composers Danny Bensi & Saunder Jurriaans – who got their first ever composing gig in film via Griffin’s Cannes preemed directorial debut, Two Gates of Sleep.

Gist: Naomi Watts plays a former 60’s activist, a celebrated counter-culture figure who now lives alone in her Bronx apartment and who has barely left her six-story walk up in years, becomes unraveled when an unseen tormentor begins harassing her as the events of the 1977 New York blackout riots unfold outside her window. A significantly larger budgeted in comparison to his lyrical, micro-budget debut, we look forward in seeing how his toolset matured over the stretch.

Production Co./Producers: Bailey Conway (Insidious: The Last Key), Automatik’s Brian Kavanaugh-Jones (Teen Spirit), Bradley Pilz (Dreamland).

Prediction: U.S. Dramatic Comp.

U.S. Distributor: Rights Available. CAA (domestic). Hanway (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).