Sundance International Film Festival allows for a wide variety of unique and personal films to be screened each year. Such allows for several emotional and difficult stories to be told throughout the festival. One such entry from this past year’s festival centers around the harrowing realities of mass shootings in America. “Mass” is the first feature film from director Franz Kranz, known for his role as Marty the stoner in “The Cabin in the Woods.”
The drama that debuted at Sundance earlier this year centers around two couples meeting after a tragic shooting, one being the parents of the victim and the other the shooter, per Variety. In the film, Jason Isaacs, Martha Plimpton, Ann Dowd, and Reed Birney star as the main couples discussing the shooting.
In an interview with Deadline, Kranz said that he built the film around real meetings that he had heard about with families trying to find peace. He also cited one-location films like “12 Angry Men” and “My Dinner with Andre” as references for “Mass.”
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Kranz took on a challenging and widely discussed topic to build his first feature around. This project looks to be one to create a dialogue around the after-effects of such events. These tragedies create generations of trauma that can be hard to describe. “Mass” will not be able to address all of these complexities, but it should at least try to capture what conversations in this country about shootings and gun laws can look like.
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Bleecker Street bought the films’ distribution rights out of Sundance. The film is set to be released on October 8 in theaters. You can check out the trailer here: