What’s Up Doc?: Crocodile Gennadiy Among Top Sundance Hopefuls (November 2014)

Turkey or no turkey, these next couple of days lucky filmmakers who’ve been selected to screen as part of the Sundance Film Festival will get the invitation notice straight from John Cooper and the Park City programming team, and thus, those that we’re betting have made the cut have also inched up the list a bit. One of those that seem an obvious choice to premiere at the fest is director Steve Hoover and producer Danny Yourd’s Crocodile Gennadiy. Following up their Grand Jury Prize winning Blood Brother with incredible turnaround time, our new most anticipated film tracks the delicate operations of Gennadiy Mokhnenko, a Ukrainian activist, orphanage manager and savior of countless children whose addict parents favor injected cold medicine and alcohol over them. Part heartwrenching domestic drama, part sleuth thriller, the film looks to use the Ukrainian uprising as a backdrop to highlight its protagonist’s valient efforts to mitigate extreme cases of child neglect and abuse (the film crew was actually attacked by an angry mob at one point). With Terrence Malick serving as executive producer, Atticus Ross composing an original score and cinematographer John Pope behind the camera, this thing is a non-fictional hot commodity. And if the astoundingly tense, soon-to-be-released trailer is any indication, Hoover’s film will be one hell of an intense portrait of social heroism. A sampling of test footage released about a year ago can be found directly below.

Another film that’s moved up towards the top is Bill and Turner Ross’ Western. Set in the border towns of Eagle Pass, Texas and Piedras Negras, Mexico, the Ross brothers’ latest documents the “harmonious vision of border life until the specter of cartel violence threatens to divide them.” Surely operating within the same curiously observant, Les Blank inspired mode they’ve been cultivating throughout 45365, Tchoupitoulas and even their culturally comedic web series turned three hour festival shown feature, River, their new feature recently reached picture lock after their final sound check. Though both 45365 and Tchoupitoulas found their premieres at SXSW, timing and the fact that they were one of the few filmmakers selected to participate in the Sundance Institute Music & Sound Design Lab suggests that Western is a lock for a Park City premiere. Here’s a gorgeous little teaser they dropped a while back.

Though an unlikely guest filmmaker at Sundance, Mark Cousins has a pair of films debuting on the list, I Am Belfast and Dear John Grierson: A Postscript to The Story of Film. The latter is a three hour expansion of his short of the same name produced for Sight & Sound’s recent Greatest Documentaries poll in which Cousins, in his tried and true cineaste essayistic form, tries to expand the non-fiction film canon to include “names like Pelechian, Honkasalo, Tsuchimoto, Kaul, Kötting, Leduc, Perlov, Łoziński… Names that are not household, but perhaps could be, if we loved movies more.” The former film sees Cousins dipping his toes into formally foreign waters, telling the story of his hometown of Belfast from the perspective of the city itself as a female orator. Produced in collaboration with composer David Holmes, about ten abbreviated minutes of the film were previewed at the Belfast Film Festival earlier this year, but has been in post production since. The man must be feeling inspired, as 6 Desires: DH Lawrence and Sardinia recently premiered at the BFI London Film Festival, while Life May Be played the Edinburgh International Film Festival earlier this year, both incited critical buzz around the filmmaker’s uniquely personal engagement with cinema. Cousins commands the film essay form like few filmmakers today and bears a seemingly boundless knowledge of film in all forms, so any and all new projects he’s got in the works will be ranking high on this list. Just below is a clip of Cousins speaking briefly about I Am Belfast, followed by this month’s complete breakdown of our top 50 most anticipated docs in development.

As mentioned previously, for those attached to any of the docs mentioned below — please feel free to share any updates on the status of your projects. I can be reached at jordan [at] ioncinema dot com.

Legend:

⭑ New to Chart
⬄ No Change
⬆ Position Increase
⬇ Position Drop