Festival Predictions

2016 Sundance Film Festival Predictions: Carson Mell’s Another Evil

Published on November 23, 2015

Those in the know (his following might have discovered him via his pair of novels in The Blue Bourbon Orchestra and Saguaro) appreciate his off the beaten track humor and array of trippy characters and their limitless inscribed legends. The fanfare has steadily grown in Park City with trio of animated short films in Bobby Bird: The Devil in Denim (2007), Chonto (2008), Field Notes from Dimension X : Oasis (2009). Running the full gamut of Sundance Institute’s workshops with Ajax (this could logically be his sophomore feature film), production on Carson Mell‘s directorial debut took place in November of 2014 in Arizona. With recent writing creds for Eastbound & Down and Silicon Valley, described as a supernatural comedy, the live-action Another Evil in definitely in ready mode after showing up at Champs-Élysées Film Fest’s U.S. in Progress this past June. Steve Zissis stars and somewhere in the mix…you’ll want to look out for the enigmatic Steve Little.

Gist: After encountering a ghost in his family’s vacation home, Dan (Steve Zissis) a modern artist and his wife Mary (Jennifer Irwin) hire an “industrial-grade exorcist” named Os (Mark Proksch) to get rid of the beings…turns out something does need to be exorcised but it’s not the spirits.

Production Co./Producers: Memory’s Riel Roch Decter and Sebastian Pardo (Ma, Life After Death from Above 1979).

Prediction: This quirky offering might fit best in the NEXT section, but we’re not counting out Park City at Midnight as a valid option. SXSW will likely follow suit.

U.S. Distributor: Rights Available. TBD (domestic). TBD (international)

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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).