Who says Georgetown doesn’t breed creativity? This past week at the Sundance Film Festival, the creative minds of Georgetown were well-represented, with five films whose directors, actors or producers that have graduated from the University competed in the world-famous film contest. And one of these movie, Another Earth, won big. Way big.
Another Earth, directed by Mike Cahill (COL ’01) and starring fellow alum Brit Marling (COL ’05), is a sci-fi drama about the discovery of a duplicate Planet Earth in the solar system. Marling plays Rhoda, a former MIT student who, on the night of the other Earth’s discovery, drunkenly gets into a car accident, killing a pregnant woman and her son and sending the injured boy’ father, John (William Mapother) into a coma. The drama unfolds when John wakes up, and he and Rhoda begin to develop a relationship. The film received excellent reviews, earned a standing ovation at the Sundance festival, and had already won the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize and the Special Jury Prize. Fox Searchlight was so impressed that it bought the movie for $1 million.
But Another Earth wasn’t Marling’s only accomplishment at Sundance. She and fellow alum Zal Batmanglij (COL’02) collaborated on Sound of My Voice, which also screened at the festival. Batmanglij, Marling and Cahill competed alongside Jim Whitaker’s (COL’90) 9/11 documentary Rebirth and with documentary Miss Representation, executively produced by alum Regina Kulik Scully. Finally, rap group Das Racist’s video “Who’s That? Brooown!,” created by Thomas De Napoli (COL’01) and Kevin Joyce (COL’02). competed in the “U.S. Narrative Shorts” category.
Amid the whirlwind of post-Sundance press, the filmmaking alumni could not be reached to comment this week, but leading up to the festival they sang plenty of praises for their alma mater. In an interview for Georgetown’s website, Batmanglij credited Professor John Glavin’s character screenwriting class with shaping his view of filmmaking, specifically noting Glavin’s idea that a story should be “like a puzzle, not only plot-wise but psychologically.”
Batamanglij, an English major was in Glavin’s class with Cahill, an Economics major. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the three young filmmakers met in the Anthropology department. They then competed together at a Georgetown film festival, and in her senior year, Marling took a leave of absence to travel to Cuba and shoot her first feature-length film with Cahill, a documentary entitled Boxers and Ballerinas about Cuban artists and athletes who were allowed to leave the island.
In an interview with Georgetown’s website, Glavin credited “ten years of steady and inventive work” to the trio’s emergence as “a kind of mini film industry.”
Articles about this year’s festival have overwhelmingly cited the surprising lack of celebrities, and the predominance of fresh talent in the Park City festival this year. But stepping into this void were five incredibly talented and limelight-ready Hoyas.
