Selected for SXSW Film Festival’s Narrative Feature Competition, Olivia Newman‘s First Match (read review) picked up an audience award before quickly bowing over at Netflix. I had the chance to speak to the filmmaker back in 2015 during the Sundance Film Festival – as she was invited with her feature debut in script form for the 2015 January Screenwriters Lab. We got a sense of what her influences are (the Dardenne Bros.) and the long process of building a text about estrangement parallel to encouragement (found in team sports) with a short and then into a feature.
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During the 2015 edition of the Sundance Film Festival, I got to individually chat with the filmmakers who participated in the Sundance Institute’s 2015 January Screenwriters Lab.
Sophia Al-Maria – Beretta
Yung Chang – Eggplant
Elizabeth Chomko – What They Had
Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre – Mustang
Nia DaCosta – Little Woods
Christopher Makoto Yogi – I Was a Simple Man
Jonathan Minard & Scott Rashap – Archive
Olivia Newman – First Match