Her mother (Oscar-winner Marlee Matlin), father (Troy Kutsur), and brother Leo (Daniel Durant) are all deaf and communicate using sign language.Įugenio Derbez plays the choir teacher with the expected flair-the concept of “gesticulation” itself has met its match here-and eyes potential in Ruby. Ruby, played by Emilia Jones, is the only hearing member of her family. With critics and filmmakers screening remotely from home this year, the clapping, crying, and celebration pivoted to social media, where immediately after the embargo broke those who had tuned in virtually tweeted ecstatically about the film, grateful for its uplift and, especially after this heavy year in the industry and in the world, some good, cathartic sobbing.ĬODA stands for Children of Deaf Adults, unique members of the deaf community who are hearing but grew up with ASL as their first language. CODA really is a remarkable film, the kind that has musical sequences that would have garnered mid-screening rounds of applause from an excited festival audience, and so heartfelt it would have incited more than one group sobbing session on its way to a post-credits ovation. Written and directed by Siân Heder, CODA has been described in shorthand as Glee meets Sound of Metal, the Riz Ahmed-starring film about a drummer grappling with his sudden hearing loss and attempting to acclimate into the hearing-impaired community. While a ribald comedy from the Saturday Night Live alum behind “Dick in a Box” had Park City’s thermal underwear bunched over its historic price-tag, CODA is a film more in line with the quirky-indie-that-could (in festival speak, that “could” stands for “crossover commercially”) that typically get studios excited to pull out their checkbooks.Ĭonsider, then, this a $25 million gesture of good faith, one that couldn’t happen to a sweeter film. On Saturday afternoon, it was announced that Apple Studios purchased the opening-night film CODA for a cool $25 million, meaning the first premiere of the first night of the first (and hopefully only) pandemic Sundance just set a record for the biggest sale in the festival’s history, beating last year’s surprise record-breaker, the Andy Samberg-Cristin Millioti Groundhog Day-inspired rom-com Palm Springs, which sold for $17.5 million… and 69 cents. The premiere film at this year’s virtual festival-rather than the fanfare at the Eccles Theater in Park City, couches around the world were the primo seats-certainly set a tone for an unprecedented outing that had everyone in the industry wondering how the movie, and maybe more importantly the market, would play. It took exactly 111 minutes from the start of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival for there to be an outrageous bidding war.
0 kommentar(er)
