What to see at Hong Kong’s Sundance Film Festival 2019, from Honey Boy to Brittany Runs a Marathon
- Running from September 19 to October 1 in Kowloon Bay, the event features a range of crowd-pleasing films from the main Sundance festival
- It includes Honey Boy, Shia LaBeouf’s autobiographical story of his fraught relationship with his father, and Little Monsters, starring Lupita Nyong’o
The 2019 edition of the Sundance Film Festival was one of its best in recent years. The strength of that programme is reflected in the wide array of films on offer at Sundance’s annual Hong Kong event, which opens on September 19.
Many of the films are based on real people and/or events inspired by real life, with stories often stranger than fiction.
The festival opens with Honey Boy, Shia LaBeouf’s autobiographical story of his fraught relationship with his father, who he plays here. Over the years, LaBeouf has mentioned in interviews how he hardly sees his Vietnam vet dad, who struggled with alcoholism and abused his son as he grew up. It is a factor that has led to some strange behaviour from the Transformers star over the years.
Nevertheless, LaBeouf is an acting talent who has an eye for associating himself with gifted filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone and Lars von Trier. In Honey Boy he worked with Israeli documentarian Alma Har’el – her first dramatic feature. The actor had previously executive-produced and financed Har’el’s 2016 documentary LoveTrue.
LaBeouf has a well-publicised history of alcohol issues and it was while he was in rehab that he wrote Honey Boy.
“I got straight to work pretty much from when I got out of rehab,” he says. “When I first went into it I was falling apart. Alma and I had been looking for something for a while and here there was not much acting or directing required – this is what we felt in theory, but there’s a lot of stuff going on for her to be this close to the flame for her first film.”
