The 2017 Sundance Film Festival has announced more films for its lineup, namely those in the Premieres, Documentary Premieres, Midnight, Spotlight and Kids strands. Northern Irish director Chris Baugh’s debut feature, Bad Day for the Cut, will play in the Midnight strand.
Donal, a middle-aged Irish farmer still lives at home his mother, content with a simple life. However, when she is savagely murdered Donal sets off for Belfast looking for answers – and revenge. What he finds is a world of violence and brutality that he can’t understand and a secret about his family that will shake him to his core.
Bad Day for the Cut stars Nigel O’Neill (The Secret, Game of Thrones) as Donal, alongside Susan Lynch (Happy Valley, Monroe), Stuart Graham (The Frankenstein Chronicles, The Secret) and rising stars Jozef Pawlowski (Jack Strong), and Anna Pro’chniak (Warsaw 44).
The screenplay, written by Baugh and Brendan Mullin, was developed through Northern Ireland Screen’s New Talent Focus scheme with Lottery funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Mullin produces alongside Katy Jackson (A Patch of Fog, The Survivalist).
Baugh and Mullin’s first production for their company, short horror Boys from County Hell, picked up Best Irish Short at the Kerry International Film Festival 2012. In 2013 they produced Stumpy’s Brae, a 1x 30 mins horror drama for BBC Northern Ireland. Most recently they made short kidnap thriller The Captors, selected as part of the Northern Ireland Screen and BFI Shorts to Features Programme and Dinosaurs, a 20-minute web drama pilot produced as part of RTE’s Storyland initiative.
The production team on Bad Day for the Cut also includes Ryan Kernaghan (Stumpy’s Brae, Boys from County Hell) as Director of Photography, John Leslie (The Survivalist, Behold the Lamb) as Production Designer, Brian Philip Davis (Dinosaurs, Stumpy’s Brae) as Editor, and Lisa Lavery (A Christmas Star) as Costume Designer.
For the 2017 festival, 113 feature-length films were selected, representing 31 countries and 36 first-time filmmakers, including 19 in competition. These films were selected from 13,782 submissions including 4,068 feature-length films and 8,985 short films. Of the feature film submissions, 2,005 were from the U.S. and 2,063 were international. Ninety-five feature films at the festival will be world premieres. In 2016, the Festival drew 46,600 attendees, generated $143.3 million in economic activity for the state of Utah, and supported 1,400 local jobs.
The 2017 Sundance Film Festival runs from January 19th to 29th in Park City, Utah.