Sundance Film Festival Was In full Swing Friday in Park City, with Channing Tatum, Olivia Wilde And charlie xcx In the evening, films are premiered one after the other in the famous Eccles Theatre.
First up was “Josephine,” writer-director Beth de Araujo’s raw drama about an 8-year-old girl (Mason Reeves) whose life and sense of security are upended after she witnesses a sexual assault in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Tatum and Gemma Chan play parents who are unsure how to help her deal with these new emotions and fears. The film, which entered the US Dramatic Competition, is based on de Araújo’s experience of witnessing some trauma at that age.
There was not a single seat vacant and more than 400 people on the waiting list were unable to get inside. After this, when the filmmaker and actor came on stage for the question and answer session, the crowd stood and applauded for a long time.
Araújo discovered Reeves at a farmers market in San Francisco, where she told her mother that she was casting someone for the role of Tatum and Chan’s daughter.
Reeves said that one of his favorite parts of the film was the scene in which he and Tatum eat a jelly donut.
“I only ate out and fed him the jelly part,” Reeves said.
Tatum exclaimed: “It’s true.”
She also praised her young co-star, saying, “How good is she?” He saw the film for the first time with the Sundance audience and said he “cried five, six, seven times.”
The next film, by Greg Araki “I want your sex,” It brought about a distinct change in Ackles’ tone. It is the story of a 20 year old college graduate (played by the actor). cooper hoffman ) who got her first job as an apprentice/assistant to a famous art world provocateur named Erica Tracy (Wilde), whom Arkai described as “daring, daring and very controversial”, a mix between Robert Mapplethorpe and Madonna.
“This is the story of their cases and how it impacts this kid’s life and how it turns his whole world upside down,” Araki told The Associated Press. “It’s fun, it’s colorful, it’s sexy. And it’s a ride.”
This is a film that Araki has been working on for more than 10 years, as it evolved from a “Fifty Shades of Grey” comic with a female apprentice to what it is now.
“After #MeToo and harvey weinsteinWhatever was going on, it was literally like, I really don’t want to see a woman being dragged by the hair,” Araki said. “I don’t want to seed that kind of patriarchal dynamic, even if it’s consensual.”
The change in gender roles and making the young apprentice male made the film more interesting to Araki, “as a filmmaker who has always been heavily influenced by feminist film theory and feminism in general,” she said.
At the same time, he was absorbing news about Gen Z and how they don’t have sex or relationships anymore and a new dynamic emerged.
“As an older person, as an old-timer, everything I knew about socialization, dating, sex, all these things, was disappearing,” Araki said. “And so it became a major theme of the film.”
The things Wilde’s character says are things he has also said in interviews about sex and sexuality. A generational debate erupts regarding his character. And ultimately it’s sex positive.
“It was very important for me to make something sex positive,” Araki said. “‘I want your sex’ is like the opposite of ‘ Baby girl,’Which seemed very sex negative to me.’
Wilde said after the premiere that she wished “more people made movies” like Araki: a nice group of people getting together and making something fun in a non-corporate environment.
The film also features a supporting cast featuring Charli XCX, who was a fan of Araki and whose “Brat” album cover It was partly inspired by the title credits of his film “Smiley Face”. She said, when she heard about this new film she asked if she could act in it. She was interested, but told her agent that she needed to do a self-tape “like everyone else” to play Hoffman’s girlfriend.
He said, “This character is not his. That’s what’s so funny.” “He’s American, he’s very agile and like a pill.”
She filmed her scenes in one day, on a two-day break in between her Brat Tour.
Ahead of its release in theaters on January 30, the world premiere of her self-referential mockumentary “The Moment”, about a rising pop star, was a Charli XCX double feature at the Eccles.
Earlier Friday, the world premiere of William David Caballero’s mixed-media film “Wedream” immersed audiences in the intimate story of a Puerto Rican family learning to navigate grief through art. Caballero and co-writer Ellen del Valle have shown short films at Sundance in the past, but were honored to bring a full-length feature to the festival.
Del Valle, who is also a producer on the film, told the AP, “Sundance for me has always been about possibilities — artists being given the space to take creative risks and tell personal stories.” “Bringing our first feature, especially to Sundance in its last year in Utah, holds a different significance.”