"I have loved this festival all my life and I came here for the first time 20 years ago", even then "I immediately felt deep down that this was a place full of yes, in a world full of no".
Thus Kristen Stewart accepted the Visionary Award 2024 on the Sundance stage. A tribute that adds to the two films that the actress has in the program, the tech love story in a world without humans anymore, Love Me by Sam & Andy Zuchero , and the sulphurous noir, already considered one of the most interesting titles of the festival, Love Lies Bleeding by the British Rose Glass, built around the love that was born in 1989 between Lou (Stewart), manager of a gym in a small town, and Jackie ( Katy O'Brian), ambitious bodybuilder.
"Awards have as much meaning as the people and places that give them to you - added Spencer's interpreter - and to be accepted by a community that I have admired so personally is beautiful and invigorating, and then it also happens at the right time. I had it need. Thank you."
The young actress, for whom Sundance is also an opportunity to find the financing with which to make The Chronology of Water, her first film as director, presents two very different characters in the two films in the program.
Love Me is set in a future world in decline, where humanity has marked its end centuries before.
A reality in which a solitary smart buoy in the ocean, powered by solar energy, which calls itself Me (Stewart), finds itself in an online connection with the satellite (Steven Yeun) that stores in its memory the explanation of what it means to be humans.
Me's need to maintain that contact pushes her to pretend to be human, drawing on the saccharine videos of an influencer with her boyfriend.
Images from which the avatars that will be 'inhabited' by the tech protagonists are born, between love and identity crisis.
"It's a very beautiful but also terrifying story - Stewart explained on the red carpet and in the theater - because it talks about a world in which we no longer exist. And the echo we have left mainly screams 'Love me!'".
This "is the most honest film about relationships and people that she has ever made," she added.
For Sam Zuchero, Love Me "is about our self and how it represents itself: how we are in our bedroom compared to how we want to be seen by others".
We turn to a much more violent and character-rich story in Love Lies Bleeding by Rose Glass in which Lou (Stewart) will have to support and protect his new love Jackie, when the bodybuilder punishes JJ (Dave Franco), a man with with whom he is having an affair, violent with his wife.
A commitment made difficult for Lou by Jackie's growing obsession, also fueled by steroids, for an upcoming bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas and complicated by the protagonist's father, Lou senior (Ed Harris),
ghostly criminal who thinks primarily of his own interests.
"The script was different from what we see in the film, but Rose is like a sculptor - explained Kristen Stewart -, I had total trust in her when she asked me to totally immerse myself in the story. It all comes from the path of discovery in the love, from the justifications we give ourselves when we love... we all have 'monsters' deep within ourselves."
Katy O'Brian (The Mandalorian), who in the past was also a police officer, and in addition to being a karateka also participated in competitions as a bodybuilder, explains that "the film is really unique and wild. We had a lot of fun making it and I can't wait to see what people think."
For Rose Glass, "Kristen was wonderful, like all the rest of the cast, they all gave their all. The filming was intense, but in a nice atmosphere."
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