Some deals for women directors coming out of Sundance.
Sony Pictures Classics is the new home of Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz’s Land Ho! In her interview with Women and Hollywood, Stephens revealed that her odd-couple comedy follows “two ex-brothers-in-law who take a trip to Iceland in order to escape the doldrums and routine of old age.”
Variety reports that AMC/Sundance Channel Global has acquired three women-directed titles from the Park City festival: Mina Dukic’s The Disobedient, Sydney Freeland’s Drunktown’s Finest, and Geetu Mohandas’ Liar’s Dice.
Dukic’s foreign import centers on a “bicycle trip by two would-be-lovers, former childhood friends, through a Serbian countryside ripe for a romance which never happens,” according to Variety.
In an interview with Women and Hollywood, Freeland explained that her motivation for making her debut was “want[ing] to tell a story about [the] people that I knew and give them a chance to be represented on film.” She described Drunktown’s Finest as a “coming-of-age story of three Native Americans growing up on a reservation: a rebellious father-to-be, a promiscuous transsexual, and an adopted Christian girl.”
Mohandas was similarly troubled by the under-representation of another overlooked community: migrant laborers in India. In her interview with Women and Hollywood, she called Liar’s Dice a film about “Kamala and her girl [and] a lamb travelling across the treacherous mountain in search of her missing husband. Along the way, she meets an army deserter who knowing the perils of the journey ahead and decides to accompany them to their destination with his own selfish motive.”
A fifth women-helmed film, Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, was picked up by France’s Kinology. Described as “cinema’s first Iranian vampire Western,” A Girl Walks Home is “set in the Iranian ghost town of Bad City, home to prostitutes, junkies, pimps and other sordid souls,” according to a press release.