2021 Sundance Market Preview: Can Live Links Replace Park City Theater Showings And Ramp Up Bidding Battles?

Park City, Utah may not have been flooded with out-of-towners this year for the Sundance Film Festival due to the pandemic, however, the annual prestige film event can celebrate that its online edition and 20 city theatrical extension drew a total audience that was 2.7 times larger than the typical 11-day Utah edition. This year’s Sundance ran from Thursday, Jan. 28 through Wednesday, Feb. 3.

A24 announced it acquired U.S. Rights to the Ninja Thyberg-directed 2021 Sundance drama Pleasure. This was a film that had been announced as a Cannes title for 2020 before the fest was canceled because of Covid, and made its debut as part of virtual Sundance.

One of the Sundance Film Festival titles this year expected to spark a bidding war was Passing, the directorial debut from Rebecca Hall. The movie, an ambitious period piece, had plenty of buzz going into the festival, and that continued with largely positive reviews.

As she explained to us in an interview of the Deep Focus podcast, Rebecca Hall has been working a long time bringing her directorial debut, “Passing,” to life. Even though the debut was delayed due to the pandemic, the period drama finally premiered as part of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

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moved to early April after originally staking out a date in March, which is now held by the Grammys after it was forced to push back as the coronavirus pandemic continues.Last year’s big winner was “Parasite,” its first major win in the awards season that would ultimately lead to its historic Best Picture win at the Oscars.

Netflix has acquired the worldwide rights to splashy Sundance title Passing, the directorial debut ofRebecca Hall that stars Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga. Sources peg the deal as being north of $15 million.

Big news for Rebecca Hall!

Irene (Tessa Thompson) rarely passes for white. She fears for her safety too much to do so.

Also Read: Female Directors Rule Sundance 2021 - Is Equality Finally Here?TheWrap’s Carlos Aguilar called the film in his review “impressively refined and superbly acted” and compared Hall to another actor turned director, Regina King, writing that “Hall arrives behind the camera fully formed as a storyteller handling thought-provoking subject matter with formidable aesthetic sensibilities.”More to come… 

EXCLUSIVE: Netflix is nearing a deal to acquire worldwide rights to Passing, the Rebecca Hall-directed and scripted drama that stars Tessa Thompson, Ruth Negga, Andre Holland, and Alexander Skarsgard. Sources said the deal will land just north of $15 million.

For the first time in recent memory, the Sundance Film Festival recruited just three members each for its competition juries. Even in the context of a virtual festival, that might have been a mistake after one film dominated the Dramatic category winning four awards.

Exquisite performances from Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga provide the pulsing, emotionally heightened center to Passing, Rebecca Hall's assured move behind the camera, adapted with great sensitivity from the 1929 novel by Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen. "We're all of us passing for something or other, aren't we?" muses Thompson's melancholy character Irene Redfield.

Sundance Film Festival Cinema Café talk on Sunday with Rebecca Hall. “Everybody was a judge and there was so much bullying going on.

Jessica Kiang It starts in sweltering heat; it ends in freezing weather. And in between, as the temperature gradually drops, Rebecca Hall’s “Passing,” based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, calmly brings the diffuse racial landscape of prohibition-era New York City into crystalline, gorgeously shot focus.

At a virtual ceremony, Natalie Qasabian was awarded the 2021 Sundance Institute / Amazon Studios Producers Award for Fiction Filmmaking  for her film, Run. The awards honor bold vision and a commitment to continuing work as a creative producer in the independent space.

Irene (Tessa Thompson) rarely passes for white. She fears for her safety too much to do so.

The presumed dead-and-buried practice of racial passing by light-skinned blacks in the United States decades ago is returned to center-stage in Passing, a delicate, sensitive, intentionally claustrophobic and not entirely limber directorial debut from the protean British stage performer Rebecca Hall.

As the Sundance Film Festival kicked off virtually amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, founder Robert Redford made a brief appearance during the opening night welcome ceremony from Park City, Utah. Redford, who skipped for the second year running the opening press conference earlier in the day, was not personally featured on screen.