Festival Predictions

2022 Sundance Film Festival Predictions: Nikyata Jusu’s Nanny

Published on November 23, 2021

If you bump into Leonean-American filmmaker Nikyata Jusu make sure to ask for lottery numbers. The filmmaker has been riding on a wave of highs when her 2019 short film Suicide By Sunlight preem at the festival, saw her feature film get onto the 2020 Black List and she got to workshop it at 2019 Sundance Institute Creative Producing Lab & Summit, Sundance’s 2020 Writer’s Lab, and the 2020 Director’s Lab. Naturally this high speed vehicle moved into production with no time to waste. Michelle Monaghan and Anna Diop boarded Nanny – a horror film with a text about survivalism in June in New York City.

Gist: This follows Aisha (Anna Diop), an undocumented nanny caring for a privileged child on the Upper East Side of New York City. As she prepares for the arrival of the son she left behind in West Africa, a violent supernatural presence invades her reality, threatening the American Dream she’s painstakingly pieced together.

Production Co./Producers: Nikkia Moulterie, Stay Gold’s Daniela Taplin Lundberg.

Prediction: MIDNIGHT.

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