2014 Sundance Film Festival Predictions: Chloe Zhao’s Lee

Chances are slim that Chloe Zhao manages to break into the 2014 edition of the Sundance Film Festival and it isn’t because there is a lack of room for a pair of Native American portraits from female filmmakers (the other being Drunktown’s Finest). Supported by both Sundance Labs (read her experience here), and solid coin from Ang Lee Scholarship for Filmmaking and the Time Warner Storytelling Fellowship and Christopher Columbus/Richard Vague Film Production Grant and top that off with a successful 80+ grand Kickstarter campaign, lensing on Lee, was completed this past month (she got the chance to work with Andrea Arnold’s right-hand man Robbie Ryan), thus the 25 New Faces of Independent Film of 2013 personality would have to work at breakneck speed in post. Ingredient worth mentioning: the participation of Eléonore Hendricks.

Gist: Lee is a seventeen-year-old Lakota boy who idly spends his days in young love with his kind and ambitious girlfriend Aurelia, his nights carousing with his loyal and wayward best friend Evan, and avoiding anything to do with his broken home life. When his sister unexpectedly dies and his home is taken away from him, Lee is driven to keep his family together at all costs, but his risky actions have consequences that forever alter his most cherished relationships. Filled with vitality and unexpected humor, LEE is the story of one young man’s winding path to self-discovery.

Production Co./Producers: Angela C. Lee & Mollye Asher

Prediction: U.S. Dramatic Competition or NEXT section – perhaps in 2015.

U.S. Distributor: Rights Available

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