First Match
Based on the 2000 award-winning short (it played at the New York Film Fest), shot in Brooklyn, the feature film version was workshopped at the Sundance Directors and Screenwriters Labs in 2015 and received some coin from the IFP. Olivia Newman‘s First Match was a little off the radar when it went into production, but we imagine this micro-indie to a swan song for girl empowerment.
With Elvire Emanuelle toplining and supporting players Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Colman Domingo (he’ll also be seen in If Beale Street Could Talk), we’re generally fans of feature films based on shorts and this H hardened by years in foster care, this is about a teenage girl (Emanuelle) from Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood decides that joining the all-boys high school wrestling team is the only way back to her estranged father. We’re seeing possible parallels to Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits due to the sport mixed in with adolescence and identity themes, but this portrait could be flip the script on something like The Place Beyond the Pines in terms of relationship dynamics between daughters and fathers.
Release Date/Prediction: With Sundance now in the rearview mirror, this could possibly be readied in time for Tribeca.
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