-- By Vanessa Zimmer
Two bleak films about determined and desperate women were Nia DaCosta's first impression of the Sundance Film Festival more than a decade ago.
First came Frozen River, at the 2008 Festival, about two poor single mothers who take up smuggling immigrants into the U.S. across the frozen St. Lawrence River. Two years later, Winter's Bone introduced Jennifer Lawrence into the world lens as a teenage girl in the Ozark Mountains who tracks her bail-skipping, meth-dealing father to keep her family from going homeless.
Both films debuted to acclaim, winning the U.S. Drama Grand Jury Prize at the Festival; Winter's Bone also captured the top screenwriting award. DaCosta was inspired.
I thought [of the Sundance Film Festival] as an American film festival that really emphasized idiosyncratic, interesting, daring American storytelling, DaCosta says. Those two movies for me, being at that festival, told me a lot about what Sundance stood for. And the way that they showed worlds that we're not used to seeing on screen and amplifying those voices.
No surprise, then, that she would turn to the Sundance Institute in 2015 to help develop Little Woods, her own gritty story of two sisters who survive in their rough North Dakota oil boomtown by operating outside the law.
In an interview last summer celebrating the Sundance Institute's 40th anniversary, New Yorker DaCosta confided she was doubtful her script would get accepted at the Institute. She graduated from film school at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, and applied for a Screenwriters Lab. Everyone else applies every year at the Sundance labs. And then after I graduated, my first year of applying, I was absolutely certain, I knew I wasn't getting in. I was like, obviously, I don't know anyone. I don't have a connection.
She passed the first round, then the second. Before she knew it, she was on the mountain in Utah's Park City, attending her first lab. And it was a really exciting experience because I got to dig into my writing in a way I hadn't really before, even though I'd spent five years essentially in higher education.
In fact, her project was intriguing enough to get accepted in 12 different programs at the Institute, including the directing lab in 2015. Every workshop and grant provided another building block in her craft, she says, and the Catalyst Forum taught her how to seek out financing so that she could start shooting in 2017.
The Directors Lab, in particular, was really special she says. Because you get to really experiment and explore. You get to really learn how to defend your ideas, defend your tastes and your vision - while also being given this amazing environment and this amazing community in which to do it all.
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