Festival Predictions

2024 Sundance Film Festival Predictions: Justin Anderson’s Swimming Home

Published on November 17, 2023

Our most anticipated feature debut films for this year is indeed ready but it’ll be dropping in 2024 instead. Perhaps a fest that is big on debut films might lasso Justin Anderson‘s Swimming Home. The commercials director grabbed the rights to adapt the book by (Deborah Levy) a good decade ago and managed to land quite the producing team and quartet of indie-auteur-world-cinema vets Ariane Labed, Christopher Abbott, Mackenzie Davis and Nadine Labaki for what is a vacation film in Greece that takes a turn for the best/worst? Production took place in October of last year.

Gist: This is a dark comedy about a troubled married couple and their teenage daughter whose holiday is transformed by the naked stranger they find floating in the pool of their villa.

Production Co./Producers: Quiddity Films’ Emily Morgan, Andy Starke, Paul Linhares, Marcos Tellechea, Giorgos Karnavas.

Prediction: World Cinema Dramatic Competition.

Sales: Bankside.

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).