It’s been an eventful early awards and festival selection season for the husband-and-wife directing team of Sean and Andrea Fine, who go by The Fines monicker as commercialmakers at production house Rabbit. This past Monday, the Documentary Premieres for the 2013 Sundance Film Festival were announced, and included in the slate of films was the Fines-directed Life According To Sam, which tells the story of Dr. Leslie Gordon and Dr. Scott Berns who fight to save their only son, Sam, from Progeria, a rare and fatal disease for which there is no definitive treatment or cure. In less than a decade, the doctors’ work has led to significant advances.
Life According To Sam will mark the Fines’ return to Sundance; back in 2007 their feature documentary War Dance–which centered on three children who live in a displacement camp in northern Uganda and go on to compete in their country’s national music and dance festival–won a Sundance Directing Award while being nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. War Dance also earned an Oscar nom for Best Feature Documentary.
Speaking of the Academy Awards, back in October the Fines’ Inocente, was selected as one of eight films on the Oscar shortlist in the Best Documentary Short Subject competition. Inocente introduces us to a homeless teenager in California who’s an artist.
At press time, the Fines were in post, putting the finishing touches on Life According to Sam. Sean Fine explained the film’s title, noting that he’s 39 years old and “learned more about life talking to and following Sam,” now age 16, over the past three years.
While the medical ramifications of the story are significant, Life According to Sam is at its heart a very personal story. “The storytelling style is reflective of how we approached Inocente and War Dance,” said Andrea Fine. “Characters tell their own stories. They look into the camera. They have a relationship with the audience. At times it feels like a conversation between the characters and the audience. A human connection is made.”
At the same time, noted Sean Fine, “We try to do our documentaries in a beautiful, cinematic way. Documentaries sometimes get a bad rap. People think they need to look like they’re unplanned or not shot well. But you can shoot something that is happening in the moment and do it beautifully–that will only elevate the real story to a higher level.”
This real story, though, is inherently at a profoundly high level. At the age of two, Sam was diagnosed with Progeria. On average, children stricken by the disease live until they’re 13. His parents didn’t accept what was considered the normal inevitable course this disease would run. They started a research foundation, discovered the gene responsible for Progeria and moved towards developing a drug that would prolong the lives of those who have the disease. This led to a landmark trial of the drug. Yet with all these developments, a lot of the film, affirmed Andrea Fine, is about “what’s important in life, what makes for a good life, a life worth living, what it is to be alive and to be a family facing unthinkable circumstances.”
The Fines’ documentary roots took hold during their tenure off and on again over 10 years as directors/producers at National Geographic, traveling to some 30 countries to chronicle subjects ranging from wildlife to life in war zones. They met each other at National Geographic, worked separately at first, then got married. They started directing together upon leaving National Geographic. Their first major co-directing project was Fatherhood in America for Spike TV. After that came War Dance. Their filmography also includes In the Moment: Lindsay Vonn, chronicling the famed Olympic skier during a pivotal moment in competition.
Meanwhile, the Fines have diversified into commercialmaking at Rabbit where they have been for nearly a year, breaking in with a Dreft detergent spot for Saatchi & Saatchi New York capturing babies at their most mischievous. Next came an ambitious Gillette spot, “World Shave,” for BBDO New York, which focused on a guy using the same razor for five weeks as he traveled around the world. The actual shoot entailed seven countries in five weeks as the Fines followed the man on various adventures ranging from swimming in frigid water in Iceland, to encountering sharks while in a shark cage in South Africa.
The Fines then had a return engagement with BBDO NY for Save The Children and the Ad Council; the PSA follows a box which makes it way to a health worker in Malawi. He opens the box to reveal a stethoscope which he places on a child’s heart, recording the beat. Next, the box and the heartbeat recording are in a L.A. sound studio where pop band One Republic creates a beat-inspired song, “Feel Again,” which has gone on to become popular on iTunes, with downloads raising money for Save The Children. The spot is the centerpiece of the “Every Beat Matters” campaign.
“We decided to get into commercials because it’s a different form of storytelling,” related Sean Fine. “It’s hard to tell stories in such a short time but the experience has pushed us in different directions and helped us develop as filmmakers. We want to continue [with commercials and branded content]. For our next endeavor, we hope to get into fictional feature films. We have some projects in development.”
Mother of George
Making her debut as a narrative feature executive producer is Rhea Scott, president of Little Minx, collaborating with exec producers/producers Lars Knudsen and Jay Van Hoy of Parts and Labor–the company she said is “doing the heavy lifting”–on the Andrew Dosunmu-directed film Mother of George, which is in Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic Competition.
Scott described the story’s protagonist as a woman–an African immigrant in Brooklyn–being pressured to do anything and everything to save her marriage. “It’s not her free choice to do so,” related Scott. “She’s a character torn between the world she lives in and the culture she comes from. It’s a powerful story that is poetic and strong.”
Mother of George brings exec producer Scott back together with Dosunmu; they first met at Propaganda Films back when Dosunmu was a promising music video director. The film’s cast includes Isaach De Bankole, Danai Gurira, Anthony Okungbowa, Yaya Alafia and Bukky Ajayi.
Scott is no stranger to Sundance, having seen two of the Little Minx-produced shorts in the Exquisite Corpse series selected for screening at the 2009 Festival. One of those shorts, She Walked Calmly Disappearing Into the Darkness, was directed by Malik Sayeed who continues to make Little Minx his production company roost.
And Herve & Francois of Little Minx directed the short Logorama which opened the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and won an Oscar for Best Animated Short.
Scott sees the Sundance debut for Mother of George as lending momentum to her and Little Minx as feature producers, which in turn will help to realize her vision of creating more long-form opportunities for commercial and music video directors on the Little Minx roster.
Rundown
Among the other artisans with spotmaking ties whose work is slated for 2013 Sundance Festival exposure are:
o Director Fredrik Bond of MJZ will see his The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman in the out-of-competition Premieres section of Sundance. The storyline finds Charlie Countryman traveling abroad and falling for Gabi, a Romanian beauty whose unreachable heart has its origins in Nigel, her violent, charismatic ex. As the darkness of Gabi’s past increasingly envelops him, Charlie resolves to win her heart, or die trying. Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Evan Rachel Wood, Mads Mikkelsen, Rupert Grint, James Buckley, Til Schweiger.
o Director David Gordon Green of production house Chelsea–and who helmed this year’s Chrysler Super Bowl spot “It’s Halftime in America”–finds his Prince Avalanche, which he also scripted, in the Premieres showcase. The film centers on two highway road workers who spend the summer of 1988 away from their city lives. The isolated landscape becomes a place of misadventure as the men find themselves at odds with each other and the women they left behind. Cast: Paul Rudd, Emile Hirsch.
o Oscar-winning documentarian (Taxi to the Dark Side) Alex Gibney, also repped by Chelsea for spots, has his We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks in the Documentary Premieres section. In 2010, WikiLeaks and its sources used the power of the Internet to usher in what was for some a new era of transparency and for others the beginnings of an information war.
o Oscar-winning documentarian American Dream, Harlan County USA) Barbara Kopple, handled for spots and branded fare by Nonfiction Unlimited, directed Running from Crazy, which made the Documentary Premieres showcase. In the documentary, Mariel Hemingway, granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, strives for a greater understanding of her family history of suicide and mental illness. As tragedies are explored and deeply hidden secrets are revealed, Mariel searches for a way to overcome a similar fate.
o Oscar-nominated director (Waste Land, The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom) Lucy Walker, whose roost for spots and branded content is Supply&Demand Integrated, earned inclusion in the Documentary Premieres showcase with The Crash Wheel. The jaw-dropping story of athlete Kevin Pearce encompasses an eye-popping sport, snowboarding; and one explosive issue, traumatic brain injury. An epic rivalry between Kevin and Shaun White culminates in a life-changing crash and a comeback story with a difference.
o Directors Jane Campion and Garth Davis (who is repped by Anonymous Content for spots) will have their Top of the Lake screened in the Premieres section of Sundance. This six-hour film finds a 12-year-old girl standing chest deep in a frozen lake. She is five months pregnant, and won’t say who the father is. Then she disappears. So begins a haunting mystery that consumes a community. Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Holly Hunter, Peter Mullan, David Wenham.
o RJ Cutler, who’s handled by RSA Films for spots and branded content, teamed with Greg Finton to direct The World According to Dick Cheney, a Documentary Premieres selection.
o And Moxie Pictures‘ first narrative feature film, Austenland, produced in concert with Fickle Fish Films, was one of 16 movies selected for the U.S. Dramatic Competition. Austenland marks the directorial debut of Jerusha Hess who co-scripted the indie hit and Sundance favorite Napoleon Dynamite with her husband, director Jared Hess. The big screen adaptation of author Shannon Hale’s novel, Austenland centers on 30-something single Jane Hayes who’s obsessed with the Mr. Darcy character in the BBC rendition of Pride and Prejudice–to the point where it’s ruining her love life as no real man can compare. But when Hayes decides to spend her life savings on a trip to an English resort catering to Austen-crazed women, her fantasies of meeting the perfect Regency-era gentleman suddenly become more real than she could have ever imagined. Hayes is played by Keri Russell (Felicity, Mission Impossible II, Waitress). Stephanie Meyer (The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part I, Breaking Dawn Part 2, The Host) produced Austenland via Fickle Fish Films. Exec producers are Moxie’s Robert Fernandez and Dan Levinson.
