Film Festivals

Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You | 2018 Sundance Film Festival World Premiere

Published on July 5, 2018

Perhaps the most hyped film to premiere at this year’s Sundance film festival, the over-sold world preem screening at the Library had plenty of curious distrib folk (Annapurna folks quickly took the film off table) in the bidding for Boots Riley‘s debut film – his multi-genre film that disobeys categorization and quickly became a buzz title due to some a couple of sequences that had a lot of girth. Sorry to Bother You lassoed the likes of Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Armie Hammer, Steven Yeun, Omari Hardwick and Danny Glover, but it’s the impressive set of producers (Nina Yang Bongiovi, Forest Whitaker, Charles D. King, George Rush, Jonathan Duffy and Kelly Williams) who championed the project prior to the first of the Sundance Institute’s many labs.

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).