But Springsteen has been in a very introspective mode with his autobiography and Broadway show, and the filmmakers met Springsteen and charmed him enough to bless the project and make it possible to feature his songs. Landing the rights to use that many songs from an artist as major as Springsteen is a blockbuster proposition. Manzoor is even more of a Springsteen fanatic than I am, and he’s been to about 150 shows. The Boss’ working-class anthems and affirming lyrics seem to speak directly to Javed, emboldening him to find his own voice as a writer, stand up to the racism around him and challenge his father’s rigid ideals.īased on the memoir Greetings from Bury Park by journalist/writer Sarfraz Manzoor. What young Javed really wants is to be a writer - something his father doesn’t approve of or understand - and when a new friend loans him a few Bruce Springsteen cassettes, Javed is changed forever. His father’s recent job termination and the neighborhood skinheads are a daily reminder of the difficult times he’s living in.
The film revolves around Javed, a 16 year old Pakistani boy growing up in Margaret Thatcher’s England in 1987, in the town of Luton. The exec producers are Tory Metzger, Renee Witt, Peter Touche, Stephen Spence, Hannah Leader, Tracy nurse and Berges. The film was financed by Levantine Films was produced by Chada, Jane Barclay and Levantine’s Jamal Daniel. Chadha wrote the script with Sarfraz Manzoor and Paul Mayeda Berges.
#BLINDED BY THE LIGHT 2019 FREE#
Some of the allure of Blinded by the Light had to do with the surprisingly universal appeal of Springsteen’s coming-of-age tunes, which tell honest stories about a hardscrabble upbringing, ambition and the fight to break free of all shackles to do something worthwhile with one’s life. The studio has been doing well in a variety of avenues, from Crazy Rich Asians and A Star Is Born to the Peter Jackson WWI documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. Release details still are being decided, but they’re looking at a possible summer berth. The deal is both New Line and Warner Bros, the latter of which will market and distribute the film.
It is the biggest sum paid for a Sundance film so far in what has turned out to be a very hot market.Įndeavor Content brokered the all-night deal, and ICM Partners reps Chada.ĮOne already had pre-bought UK, Australia and New Zealand on the film. New Line and Warner Bros won an auction rumored to have included Fox Searchlight, Lionsgate and others. “No one cares where you’re from in America,” he says, delivering a line that conveys enough idealism and dashed-hopes irony to have been written by the Boss of us all himself.Amazon Closing $14M Deal For Scott Burns-Helmed Drama 'The Report': Sundance Danny Moloshok/ShutterstockĪ big wide release is planned for the pic starring Viveik Karla, Nell Williams and Hayley Atwell. But a vein of melancholy runs through the movie, echoed in Chadha’s preferred palette of blues, teals and aquas, that is only underscored when Javed considers leaving England entirely and going west, like all dream-driven young people.
“Blinded by the Light” is enormous fun, especially when it’s gently mocking ’80s-era technology and Flock of Seagulls haircuts. The coming-of-age beats in “Blinded by the Light” aren’t necessarily new Chadha herself already created a classic of the form with “Bend it Like Beckham.” But she’s done it again here in a whole new way, using an entirely different cinematic language that captures Javed’s fraught interior journey with equal parts stylized whimsy and shared anguish. Kalra, who makes his feature debut here, plays Javed with quiet, hangdog earnestness that earns the viewer’s trust and empathy almost instantly.
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