French cinema at the 38th Sundance Film Festival

Audrey Diwan will eventually not experience the joys of the snows of Utah, where the Sundance Film Festival (January 20-30, 2022) is taking place, as always mainly dedicated to American independent cinema, as this 2022 edition will be entirely held online. And French short films will have the lion's share of attention with the presence of eight, majority-French titles (seven of which are in competition), and three immersive works.

Amidst its dozens of American or English-language feature films, the next Sundance Film Festival (January 20-30, 2022) will include, as is the case every year, the programming of two international competitions for fiction and documentary. The World Cinema Dramatic Competition will feature The Cow Who Sang A Song Into The Future by Francisca Alegria, a majority-French coproduction by Cinéma Defacto, and Utama by Alejandro Loayza Grisi, coproduced by Alpha Violet.

Also from France, Audrey Diwan will come to present her celebrated Happening in the Spotlight section.

French shorts in the spotlight

Out of a total of 59 short films selected for competition (the festival received 10,321 short film submissions), seven will represent the diversity of French creation. Two animated films are in competition: Goodbye Jerome! by Adam Sillard, Gabrielle Selnet, and Chloé Farr, three students studying at Gobelins (which is producing the film). The film is distributed by Miyu Distribution. The second, Swallow the Universe, directed by Nieto and produced by Autour de Minuit, continues its successful international festival career with Sundance.

Goodbye Jerome!

Three short fiction films are also part of the French selection in competition: The Right Words by Adrian Moyse Dullin, produced by Punchline Cinéma; Warsha, a Franco-Lebanese film directed by Dania Bdeir and produced by GoGoGo Films, and Makassar Is a City for Football Fans by Khozy Rizal, both of which will be presented in their American premiere.

The Right Words

Finally, two short French documentaries complete the international competition: Listen to the Beat of Our Images by Audrey Jean-Baptiste and Maxime Jean-Baptiste, produced by the Observatoire de l’Espace du CNES, and $75,000, a film about albinism produced by Le Fresnoy and directed by Moïse Togo.

Another French short film will be presented out of competition: the multi-award-winning Butter Lamp by Wei Hu, produced by Ama Productions.

Out of 12 immersive works in competition in the New Frontiers section, three will illustrate the strength of French creativity: Atlas V's latest collective production On the Morning you Wake (To The End of the World), receiving its world premiere, They Dream in My Bones - Insemnopedy II by Faye Formisano, another Fresnoy production, and the augmented reality documentary work Seven Grams (selected at GIFF) by Karim Ben Khelifa and produced by Lucid Realities. This film follows the production chain of our smartphones and documents their human cost.