Sundance 2015: Festival Unveils U.S. & World Cinema Competition Slates + Next Line Up

Sundance 2015: Festival Unveils U.S. & World Cinema Competition Slates + NEXT Line-Up

By Dominic Patten

Deadline – December 3, 2014

The first of the movies in the 2015 Sundance Film Festival were revealed today with the slates for the U.S. and World Cinema Dramatic and Documentary competitions as well as the out of competition NEXT selection – see the full list below.

The U.S. dramatic selection has the second feature from the Emmy winning American Horror Story and Red Band Society director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, an adaption of the graphic novels Diary Of A Teenage Girl and 2012 Black Lister Stockholm, Pennsylvania with Cynthia Nixon and Saoirse Ronan. Coming off last year Oscar winning 12 Years A Slave, Chiwetel Ejiofor is leading the cast of sci-fi pic Z For Zachariah with The Wolf Of Wall Street’s Margot Robbie and Star Trek’s Chris Pine in the same selection. Sundance vets Kristin Wiig and Nick Offerman also appear in pics in the U.S. Dramatic slate along with Guy Pearce, Giovanni Ribisi, Sarah Silverman, Jack Black, Brooklyn Decker and Downton Abbey’s Elizabeth McGovern. Nicole Kidman, Michael Fassbender, Toni Collette and Vincent Cassel are featured in four of the 12 films in competition in the always varied World Cinema Dramatic category for the 31st annual Film Fest.
A film directed by comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, another featuring LA’s Pulitzer winning food critic Jonathan Gold, a look at the amateur porn industry, white supremacy, and a new one from Academy Award winning director of The Cove are among the American documentary offerings. In the World Cinema Documentary slate, conflict in the Middle East, the origins of Greenpeace and a sometimes comedic exploration of mankind’s first encounter with aliens are to hit the big screen at Sundance next month. In the often startling and innovative NEXT section, Michael Cera and John C. Reilly make appearances as does Kristin Wiig and Cynthia Nixon for the second time this Sundance so far.

Starting a week later than usual next year to stay out of the way of the Martin Luther King Jr holiday weekend, the 2015 festival will run from January 22 to February 1. Playing in Utah’s Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, 118 features were selected from 12,166 submissions, including 4,105 feature-length films and 8,061 short films. So obviously a lot of work went into culling all that down to the 2015 line-up with almost 30 countries represented and 45 first-time filmmakers, including 19 in competition. As in past years, Deadline co-Editor-in-Chief, Film Mike Fleming Jr. and myself will lead our coverage of the Robert Redford founded festival with news of the deals, the films and the scene.

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