Festival Predictions

2022 Sundance Film Festival Predictions: Del Kathryn Barton’s Blaze

Eugene Hyland

2022 Sundance Film Festival Predictions: Del Kathryn Barton’s Blaze

Published on November 22, 2021

A creative mind that appears to know no bounds, Aussie-based artist Del Kathryn Barton moved from the blank canvas to the film beginning with the Berlinale short Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose in 2015 and followed that up with a short art performance type featuring Cate Blanchett called Red (about a mother embodies a female redback spider, which eats its mate after sex). We imagine her debut film which mergers live action, VFX and stop-motion animation techniques began pre pandemic. Simon Baker and Julia Savage boarded Blaze and there are some noteworthy key members onboard with the producer behind The Nightingale and Sundance grand slam The Babadook. We have Jeremy Rouse – the cinematographer for The Rover, production designer Alex Holmes (The Invisible Man), and Sam Petty and Angel Olsen help composed the film. For more on the artist – check out this article.

Gist: Blaze (Julia Savage) is a teenager who is the sole witness to a shocking crime. Struggling to make sense of what she saw, she unleashes the wrath of a dragon coming from her wild imagination.

Production Co./Producers: Causeway Films’ Samantha Jennings.

Prediction: WORLD CINEMA DRAMATIC COMPETITION.

U.S. Distributor: Rights Available. MK2 (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).