Annual Top Films Lists

Top 200 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2023: #65. Sophie Barthes’ The Pod Generation

Published on January 16, 2023

The Pod Generation

We thought there was an outside chance that this third feature film The Pod Generation from French-American filmmaker Sophie Barthes would premiere late in ’22, but instead it’s heading (and among the opening films) to Sundance and it already bagged one prize in the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film award. Production on the film took place in Belgium in March of ’22, with Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor toplining. After Cold Souls (2009) and Madame Bovary (2014), Barthes returned to a space she knows well – human condition at a crossroads with science fiction with her brand of satire. Quad’s Yann Zenou (The Death of Stalin) and Scope’s Geneviève Lemal (Annette), Nadia Khamlichi and Martin Metz produced the project and cinematographer-hubby Andrij Parekh is a key component of the creative team.

Gist: A New York couple and their wild ride to parenthood in this brave new world by using a new tool developed by a tech giant, Pegasus.

Release Date/Prediction: This will premiere in the Premieres section at the Sundance Film Festival.

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).