American New Wave 25: Lance Emands

Getting his feet wet on a number of gigs that included working for Todd Solondz (Palindromes), post-prod assistant experience for Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers and television’s The Wire, surely helped trace the route of where this graduate of NYU’s Tisch (2004) is headed, but it’s Vacationland, the award-winning thesis short film that earned Lance Edmands his stars. Edmands stripes came via the position of film editor for Matt Wolf‘s Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, Jody Lee Lippes‘ Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same and Lena Dunham‘s breakout SXSW hit, Tiny Furniture.

The New Englander has been making the kind of strides that will soon lead him to a full fledge member of the director’s club, with this year being a pivotal one for Edmands. A double dipping at the Sundance Labs (Screenwriters in January and the Directors this past June) on his first feature film project entitled Bluebird, is naturally a great sign of things to come – but the actress who ends up signing on for this project should expect some difficult emotional terrain. The project is set in a backdrop that is familiar to the filmmaker (the state of Maine) and according to this Sony production blog, will be one of those validating and demanding screen roles that visits the darker corners of the psyche. Shooting is expected to begin during the frigid winter season, so I’m expecting Edmands’ name to be synonymous with the 2012 edition of Sundance.