2022 Sundance Film Festival Predictions: Mariama Diallo’s Master

Successfully having your short film selected for the Sundance Film Festival is going into it with odds stacked against you. Leaving the fest with a major win is next level. Mariama Diallo saw her sophomore short film Hair Wolf won the 2018 Sundance Film Festival Jury Award for US Fiction short film and she then directed four episodes of Random Acts of Flyness before moving into a feature film that almost became a Covid casualty when it begin and was erupted in March of 2020. An Amazon Studios backed project, Diallo’s Master lassoed Regina Hall in late 2019, and you’ll notice Never Rarely Sometimes Always Talia Ryder as part of the supporting players. Set as a New England occult item, this reteams the filmmaker with her Hair Wolf cinematographer Charlotte Hornsby.

Gist: The film follows two African American women at a predominantly white college in Massachusetts – one head of students (aka Master) and one a freshman – who start to experience haunting activities ingrained in the history of the school.

Production Co./Producers: Animal Kingdom’s Andrea Roa, Brad Becker-Parton and Josh Astrachan.

Prediction: MIDNIGHT

U.S. Distributor: Amazon Studios.