American New Wave 25: David Robert Mitchell

Tucked away at the other end of the Croisette is the Cannes sidebar section called the Critic’s Week. At most, the selection committee picks ten features in total from first and second time filmmakers, so one could argue that the films selected for this competition are pretty damn special. It took Detroit native David Robert Mitchell about eight years to fully realize his creation, and if we base ourselves on the reception The Myth of the American Sleepover received at SXSW (where it claimed the Special Jury Prize for Best Ensemble) then the future looks rosy for both the filmmaker and the coming-of-age dramedy. For the time being, the film will travel the film festival circuit (it just won a prize in Munich) and we should expect a theatrical release at some time in 2011 from a specialized distributor.

After completing the film program at Florida State University plus a short film in tow (Virgin), Mitchell headed out to Los Angeles and like anyone trying to break into film took on jobs on film sets. Unlike several films include in our 25 feature profiles, this film doesn’t appear to have received flattering amounts of funding and the such, which just goes to show that they come in all shapes and sizes — as Filmmaker Magazine calls it a return to old indie filmmaking. According to a feature on IndieWIRE, Mitchell has got similar projects in the works including: a script about a boy pursuing a girl that he says is “tonally similar to ‘Sleepover,’” in addition to a story about an L.A. woman in her 20s, which he described as a “simple character story.”