The Sundance Film Festival starts this week (we’ve just finished weatherising our Damon Wise for the event; think the rebel base on Hoth if you need a visual) but already one of the most anticipated movies is Primer director Shane Carruth’s first film in nearly a decade, Upstream Color. In advance of the premiere, Carruth and co have put out a new trailer, available over at Apple.
While most of the details are being kept under wraps for now, the basic synopsis of the movie reads thusly: “A man and woman are drawn together, entangled in the lifecycle of an ageless organism. Identity becomes an illusion as they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked lives.”
Beyond that, all we have is a cast list, with Carruth appearing alongside Andrew Sensenig, Brina Palencia, Amy Seimetz, Juli Erickson, Frank Mosley and Mollie Milligan.
It’s refreshing to see a filmmaker keeping so much close to his chest, but that’s not all Carruth is doing this time around. Disheartened by the treatment Primer received, he’s decided to self-distribute the new film, kicking off at Sundance with a European premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February, before a US release starting April 5 in New York and VOD in May.
"As a filmmaker, you try to make a compelling case for an audience to stick around minute by minute with what is on the screen,” Carruth says in a release picked up by the Hollywood Reporter. “By also crafting the marketing, we’re still doing that, still storytelling, but we’re trying to make a case for an audience to show up. Hopefully for viewers, framing the film this way and staying true to the film’s intent makes it a bit more of an intimate relationship."
Primer was much lauded critically and has been quietly very influential on sci-fi and indie drama since; let's hope that its cult reputation makes this one an even bigger success.