The US film industry’s first major gathering since wildfires devastated Los Angeles began Thursday at Sundance, where Olivia Colman and John Lithgow kicked off the indie movie festival under somber circumstances.
Hollywood’s annual pilgrimage to the Rocky Mountains to debut the coming year’s top indie films started barely two weeks after blazes killed more than two dozen people and brought the US entertainment capital to a halt.
Festival chiefs spoke at length with filmmakers “who lost homes or were displaced” by the fires before deciding to press ahead, Sundance director Eugene Hernandez told AFP.
Among those were the team behind “Didn’t Die,” an indie zombie movie about survivors podcasting to an ever-dwindling human population, which was partly shot in the filmmakers’s now-destroyed Altadena homes.
“We turned the film in, and a few days later… our homes were lost,” director Meera Menon told AFP.
The film’s producer and editor, who lived …