Festival Predictions

2022 Sundance Film Festival Predictions: Carter Smith’s Swallowed

Published on November 24, 2021

It’s hard to believe that filmmaker Carter Smith is only three feature films into his filmography and hasn’t made a feature film in almost a decade. That all changed this summer. After delivering one of Sundance’s best short films in its forty year history in 2006’s Bugcrush (he followed that with the simmering Yearbook), Smith moved onto a studio horror film item in The Ruins in 2008 and Jamie Marks Is Dead in 2014. Using a backdrop he knows all so well in Maine, this past summer he reteamed with Jena Malone for the micro indie Swallowed – which was recently invited to the US in Progress in Wroclaw.

Gist: This is a story of friendship and small-town alienation that follows two best friends on their final night together, as it spirals into a backwoods nightmare of drugs, bugs and horrific intimacy.

Production Co./Producers: Helio Campos, Noah Lang, Ross O’Connor, Carter Smith.

Prediction: MIDNIGHT

U.S. Distributor: Rights Available. ICM (domestic, international).

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).