Festival Predictions

2024 Sundance Film Festival Predictions: Anu Valia’s We Strangers

Published on November 17, 2023

She pretty much began her film career with a bang winning Sundance’s Jury Prize for US Fiction for her short, and then followed that up with lots of television work (more recently directing She-Hulk: Attorney at Law) before moving into her feature film debut this past February. Shot in Indiana, Anu Valia‘s We Strangers is about class divides and it was supported by Cinereach, the Sundance Institute and 2023’s U.S. in Progress at the American Film Festival in Wroclaw.

Gist: This follows Rayelle “Ray” Martin, who is a commercial cleaner for a company that sends her to clean foreclosed homes and commercial spaces. While on the job, she meets a dentist who invites her to become his personal housekeeper for a substantial amount of money. Ray accepts the job, and she unwittingly enters a whole new world of the rich Northwest Indiana elite.

Production Co./Producers: Miranda Kahn, Olivia Wingate, Alex Bach, Zach Spicer, Joy Jorgensen.

Prediction: U.S. Dramatic Competition.

Sales: TBD.

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).