Unrest, a documentary produced by Lindsey Dryden (BA Media and Communications, 2003) and directed by Jennifer Brea, has been selected as one of the highly anticipated narrative documentaries to receive a world premiere.
About Sundance Film Festival
Founded by Robert Redford in 1978, the Sundance Film Festival celebrates creativity and independence in cinema. This year, screenings will happen between 19 and 29 January 2017 in Park City, Utah and at Sundance Mountain Resort. The Sundance Film Festival 2017 will showcase 66 films selected for US Competition, World Competition and NEXT.
About Unrest
Director Jennifer Brea was a journalist and academic studying for a PhD at Harvard. Months before her wedding, she became progressively ill, losing the ability to even sit in a wheelchair. When told by her doctor it was “all in her head,” her response was to start filming from her bed, gradually deploying crews globally to document the world inhabited by millions of patients that medicine forgot.
Unrest tells the story of Jen and Omar, newlyweds facing the unexpected, and the four extraordinary M.E. patients that Jen meets throughout her journey, in the US, UK and Denmark. Together, they explore how to make a life of meaning when everything changes. The film is a feat of disability filmmaking, made with an international team and using innovative technologies to allow the bedbound, disabled director to travel the world and film as if she’s in the room.
About Producer Lindsey Dryden
Lindsey Dryden is an award-winning British director and producer, who began making creative documentaries with a focus on the body, after starting her career in British TV docs (BBC, Channel 4, History Channel).
Her films, including Lost and Sound and Close Your Eyes And Look At Me, have shown at festivals worldwide including SXSW, True/False, Sheffield Doc/Fest and Film Society of Lincoln Center’s ‘Art Of The Real’. Lindsey has been supported by IFP, IDFA DocLab Academy and Hot Docs Forum, and is a regular mentor and speaker at festivals, a film lecturer, a recent Filmmaker-In-Residence at Jacob Burns Film Center, and a proud member of the Queer Producers Collective. She works between the UK and the US and is currently producing Unrest, and directing Billy, a hybrid music mystery film and interactive experience about a gender outlaw.
Lindsey on premiering in competition at Sundance Film Festival:
“It’s very exciting to be premiering in competition at Sundance, especially alongside films like Whose Streets and Chasing Coral. I’m thrilled to be involved in telling this beautiful and powerful story, and grateful to our incredible team and host of wonderful supporters. It’s an honour that Unrest‘s first encounter with the world is at a festival as supportive of independent cinema as Sundance; I think we need independent storytellers now more than ever.”
