2019 Sundance Film Festival Predictions: #69. Matt Wolf – Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project

More or less working on what we can imagine was a bewildering docu project for the past four years, NYC based filmmaker Matt Wolf‘s Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project should have docu programmers salivating in 2019. Wolf was at Sundance with his 2014 short, It’s Me, Hilary: The Man Who Drew Eloise and 2017’s Bayard & Me, but he is best known for Wild Combination and Teenage. Composer Owen Pallett came onboard to the music component.

Gist: Marion Stokes secretly recorded television 24 hours a day for 30 years from 1975 until her death in 2012. For Marion taping was a form of activism to seek the truth, and she believed that a comprehensive archive of the media would be invaluable for future generations. Her visionary and maddening project nearly tore her family apart, but now her 70,000 VHS tapes are being digitized and they’ll be searchable online.

Production Co./Producers: Electric Chinoland Prod.’s Kyle Martin (My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea), End Cue’s Andrew & Walter Kortschak (The Art of Self-Defense).

Prediction: U.S Documentary Comp.

U.S. Distributor: Rights Available. CAA (domestic). TBD (international).