Amalia Ulman: Last News

EXCLUSIVE: Kyle Jaeger has joined 2AM as a manager and will focus on representing emerging creators across film, television, and theater.

EXCLUSIVE: Robert Schwartzman and Cole Harper’s growing U.S. distribution and sales firm Utopia has promoted Kyle Greenberg to Head of Marketing & Distribution.

Anna Marie de la Fuente Utopia Media, the fledgling sales and distribution company co-founded by filmmaker Robert Schwartzman, has picked up North American rights to artist Amalia Ulman’s debut feature ‘El Planeta.’ The dark comedy was one of the buzz titles at Sundance’s World Dramatic competition.Danielle DiGiacomo, Utopia’s Head of Content commented: “Amalia Ulman’s “El Planeta” is a pure, transportive cinematic experience that is deceptively simple in its construction, yet so layered with wit, heart, and humanity that it leaves a profound impression akin to the work of many great auteurs.”“It is a true gem of a film; Utopia couldn’t be more enamored of Amalia, her vision, and overjoyed about the ability to partner with her on its

Multidisciplinary artist Amalia Ulman makes an appealingly idiosyncratic first foray into features with El Planeta, a captivating throwback to the shaggy aesthetic of micro-budget '90s New York indies that plays like Grey Gardens with a hint of early Almodóvar. Ulman and her real-life mother Ale play a reduced family unit in the Spanish seaside town of Gijón, living beyond their dwindling means in willful denial as the foundations crumble beneath them.

El Planeta is as goofy one-off, a singularly eccentric sort of imaginative home movie in which writer-director Amalia Ulman co-stars with her non-pro mother Ale Ulman as women reduced to penury in a tiny apartment in Gijon, Spain, where they run little scams but otherwise do nothing to prevent their slide into dire homelessness and poverty. And it’s a comedy, one that will appeal to downtown-style hipsters globally, even if the conceit behind the film has its definite limits. Self-styled eccentricity in and of itself can charm but only goes so far, and the film, which world premiered over the weekend in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition lineup at the Sundance Film Festival, offers little beyond that.

Anna Marie de la Fuente Among the films in World Cinema Dramatic Competition at this year’s virtual Sundance is the darkly comic “El Planeta,” the debut feature of Spanish-Argentine artist Amalia Ulman who has worked in video, sculpture and performance art.Ulman is best known for her 2014 performance art piece “Excellences and Perfections” (more on that here), which was included in a group show at the Tate Modern. Her multidisciplinary art involves the use of social media, magazine photoshoots, interviews, self-promotion and brand endorsements as devices for her fictional narratives.“El Planeta” has even caught the eye of filmmaker-artist Miranda July (“Kajillionaire”) whose body of work includes fiction, monologue, digital media