The biggest deal of Sundance 2017 was for a woman-directed movie. Netflix shelled out $12.5 million for Dee Rees’ “Mudbound,” Deadline reports. Writer-director Eliza Hittman also secured a deal at the fest for “Beach Rats,” which was acquired by Neon for an undisclosed sum, Deadline confirms.
Netflix secured the U.S. rights and select other territories for “Mudbound,” Rees’ follow-up to her Emmy-nominated TV Movie “Bessie.” Set in post–World War II South, “Mudbound” centers on two families “pitted against a barbaric social hierarchy and an unrelenting landscape as they simultaneously fight the battle at home and the battle abroad,” Deadline writes. “The pioneer story touches on themes of friendship, heritage, and the unending struggle for and against the land.” The film stars Carey Mulligan (“Suffragette”), Jason Clarke (“Zero Dark Thirty”), Jason Mitchell (“Straight Outta Compton”), Mary J. Blige (“The Wiz Live!”), Rob Morgan (“Stranger Things”), Garrett Hedlund (“Inside Llewyn Davis”), and Jonathan Banks (“Better Call Saul”).
Rees won the John Cassavetes Award at the 2012 Independent Spirit Awards for “Pariah,” her first narrative feature. The semi-autobiographical drama centers on a lesbian teenager. “I started the movie when I was going through my own coming out process,” Rees told Women and Hollywood. I was reading a lot of Audre Lorde and listening to Nina Simone, but Audre Lorde was who I latched on to and followed her life journey. I could really relate to her experiences about fitting in and always being the ‘other.’”
“Beach Rats” also centers on an LGBTQ protagonist. The film follows Frankie (Harris Dickinson), “an aimless youth on the outer edges of Brooklyn, struggling to escape his bleak home life and navigating questions of self-identity. Frankie spends his summer balancing his time between his delinquent friends, a potential new girlfriend, and older men he meets online. As Frankie’s competing desires begin to consume him, his decisions leave him hurtling towards irreparable consequences,” Deadline summarizes.
Hittman won Sundance’s U.S. drama directing award for the film. “I think there is nothing more taboo in this country than a woman with ambition, and I am going to work my way through a system that is completely discriminatory towards women,” she said in her acceptance speech. “And Hollywood, I’m coming for you.”
Hittman’s first feature, 2013’s “It Felt Like Love,” also made its world premiere at Sundance.
