2014 Sundance Film Festival Predictions: Amy Berg’s Every Secret Thing

Once programming announcements were complete for TIFF, my thinking was that all arrows pointed to Sundance programmers gobbling up Amy Berg’s new direction in filmmaking. A crime film based on the screenplay by another Park City regular in Nicole Holofcener and shot late March in NYC, this is a departure for the filmmaker/producer of Sundance preemed doc films such as Deliver Us from Evil, Bhutto and West of Memphis. Lensed by Rob Hardy (The Forgiveness of Blood), Every Secret Thing will be a sought after acquisitions title with a new newcomer Danielle Macdonald being supported by Dakota Fanning, Diane Lane and Elizabeth Banks.

Gist: Based on Laura Lippman’s 2003 novel, when a young girl in a small town goes missing, the crime resembles a similar disappearance from seven years prior that ended in tragedy.  Police officer Nancy Gates (Banks), still haunted by the outcome of that case, believes the answers to this present-day kidnapping lie with the previous crime’s perpetrators:  two now-teenaged girls named Alice and Ronnie. Nancy’s investigation leads her again and again to Alice—a troubled young woman guarded fiercely by her protective, eccentric mother—and it soon becomes clear that Alice’s many dark secrets may hold the key to saving a little girl’s life.

Production Co./Producers: Likely Story’s Anthony Bregman (Foxcatcher) and actress Frances McDormand.

Prediction: Premieres showing more likely than a U.S. Dramatic Competition birth. Watch out for her docu on female boxers which may also make the cut and for this film to be a high fetcher among the Weinsteins, Focus and Searchlight crowds.

U.S. Distributor: Rights Available

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