April 15, 2023

Russell and Ron Mael. Credit : Courtesy of Focus Features

Sundance London 2021 To Open With Edgar Wrights The Sparks Brothers

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After a year online, Sundance announce  that Sundance Film Festival: London will return to Picturehouse Central for its sixth year. This years festival will open on 29th July with Edgar Wright‘s The Sparks Brothers.

The festival programme will run until 1st  August 2021, with full line up announced in due course.

The film’s screening will mark the film’s  UK premiere as well as Edgar Wright’s debut documentary . The Sparks Brothers  is described a musical odyssey through five weird and wonderful decades with brothers Ron and Russell Mael. The film will include a Q+A  with the band with the film and Q+A will be shown in various cinemas around the UK at the same time.

Edgar Wright said “I was just 5 years old when I was hypnotised by Ron & Russell Mael (collectively Sparks) staring at me from the telly on a 1979 episode of Top Of The Pops. Over the next four decades, their music has been a riddle turned full on obsession. The final destination of my fascination has been to make what I believe is the only thing stopping them from being as big as they deserve to be; a document of their incredible journey in music and everyone they’ve inspired along the way. It’s very exciting for me to finally bring The Sparks Brothers to Sundance London since, as the UK were the first country to embrace Sparks genius. I look forward to everyone falling in love all over again or being as amazed as I was when I first saw and heard them.”

Sundance Film Festival Director Tabitha Jackson commented “We’re thrilled to return to London and expand across the UK with an exciting program of films that tell fresh, independent stories — stories which are essential as we endeavour to understand our past while we reimagine our present and future.”

Clare Binns, Joint Managing Director Picturehouse Cinemas added: “It’s great to be back working with all of our friends at the Sundance Film Festival. We’re so excited to bring back inspiring independent films to the big screen – during this year’s Sundance London we will come together to watch, discuss, and immerse ourselves in an art form which has since been lost to us for over a year.”

Related: Our 2021 Sundance Film Festival Coverage

There aren’t many bands who arrive at their 50th anniversary on a creative roll, still luring in new generations of fans, making Top 10 albums, and doing so by releasing music every bit as challenging and inventive as their earliest recordings. In fact, there is precisely one: Sparks.

Ron and Russell Mael are rock’s original Odd Couple, as inscrutable as they are fascinating. Never content to rest on their laurels or follow musical trends, they have achieved commercial success only intermittently, and almost despite themselves. Edgar Wright’s music documentary The Sparks Brothers captures the art-pop pioneers at an improbable late career high, as well as recounting the story of how they got there, asking why they aren’t as celebrated as they deserve to be, and finding out how they became your favourite band’s favourite band.

The documentary was produced by Edgar Wright and Nira Park, though their company Complete Fiction Pictures, along with producers George Hencken, and Complete Fiction’s Laura Richardson. The film was financed by MRC Non-Fiction.

Universal will release The Spark Brothers in the UK and Ireland on 30th  July. The 2021 Sundance Film Festival: London will take place between 29th July until 1st August.

 

 

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