COLUMBUS — An Ohio film maker will also make strides for the Ohio film industry when his production premieres at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival Jan. 20-30 in Park City, Utah.
The film was produced with assistance from the Ohio Motion Picture Tax Credit, which is administered by the Ohio Film Office of the Ohio Department of Development.
Film producer Tyler Davidson, a Northeast Ohio native and resident, shot 100 percent of Take Shelter in the Greater Cleveland area this past summer. The film is about a working-class husband and father, Curtis, who’s faced with the possibility that his terrifying dreams are either premonitions or the early signs of an inherited mental illness, leading him to build a shelter in his backyard in fear of a horrible storm.
Competition
The film will be included in the prestigious U.S. Dramatic Competition section of the festival, in which only 16 films out of nearly 2,000 feature film submissions were invited. In total, including short films and documentaries, Sundance received more than 10,000 film submissions this year, an all-time record for the festival.
Davidson, who produced Take Shelter through his Los Angeles- and Northeast Ohio-based production company Strange Matter Films, employed dozens of Ohio-based actors and crew for the production, with most of the film shot around Elyria, Grafton, LaGrange and Chardon.
Past films
This is Davidson’s third film and the second that he opted to shoot in this region.
Award-winning filmmaker Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories) directed Take Shelter from his own script. The film stars Michael Shannon, a 2009 Academy Award-nominee for Revolutionary Road and current co-star on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, and newcomer Jessica Chastain, who will star in numerous films in 2011, including Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, opposite Brad Pitt and Sean Penn.
