Tyler Nilson Michael Schwartz Los Frikis

Festival Predictions

2024 Sundance Film Festival Predictions: Tyler Nilson & Michael Schwartz’s Los Frikis

Published on November 14, 2023

Sundance and SXSW programmers will likely be keeping an eye out on the status of Los Frikis – a raw, true story-type drama that might be full of hope and dread and that would have gone into production in late 2021. The tandem of Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz who saw their The Peanut Butter Falcon make waves at SXSW in 2019 are behind the real-life portrait. For this sophomore feature, the team decided to take their raft over into a story deep into some marginalized Cubans. This is lined up with Héctor Medina, Eros de la Puente, Jorge Perugorría and Adria Arjona – who also joined as a producer.

Gist: The film is based on the true story of punk-rock teenagers in Havana who deliberately inject themselves with HIV to escape the oppression of “Special Period” Cuba.

Production Co./Producers: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, Tyler Nilson, Michael Schwartz, Rebecca Karch Tomlinson.

Prediction: U.S. Dramatic Competition.

Sales: TBD.

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).