Canadian producers say the Sundance Film Festival’s last-minute pivot hasn’t dashed sales hopes for their respective world premieres.

“We of course wish that we could be in-person to share and celebrate the work together, but we don’t feel particularly worried from a business perspective because we trust our film,” Chase Joynt, director and producer of the documentary Framing Agnes (pictured), tells Playback Daily.

Sundance had originally planned to return to an in-person event in Park City, Utah this year, but two weeks before it was set to begin last Thursday (Jan. 20), organizers decided to pivot to a virtual edition due to the COVID-19 Omicron variant surge.

Framing Agnes, which had its world premiere at the festival on Saturday, Jan. 22, is produced by Joynt and Fae Pictures’ Shant Joshi.

Joynt says the company’s strategy at Sundance is a two-tiered approach. United Talent Agency (UTA) has signed on to handle the films’ sales while non-profit distribution company The Film Collaborative is serving as its festival distributor. “We’re thinking about sales, but also the potential of a robust festival circuit over the next year,” he says. “The festival format is such an exciting way to engage audiences who are keen to explore work that is more formally innovative.”

Amerique Films’ Martin Paul-Hus, one of the producers behind fellow Sundance world premiere feature Babysitter, says the prestige of having a film selected for the festival alone will help attract sales, but worries that the lack of an in-person reaction to the comedy film may impact potential buzz.

Babysitter is a feature-length comedy, directed by Monia Chokri. Based on a play by screenwriter and producer Catherine Léger, the film is a send-up of toxic masculinity. It also premiered at Sundance on Saturday.

Joynt says he sees the pivot to virtual as an opportunity to expand the film to audiences who might not have otherwise been able to attend the in-person festival.

He adds that he and Joshi were interested in working with sales agent UTA based on their track record and their experience selling the documentary Changing the Game, which follows the stories of three transgender student athletes. “It was really important to us that we partnered with people who could talk about our film and understood the sociopolitical stakes,” he says.

Framing Agnes reimagines the version of trans history formed around the historical Agnes, whose efforts to have gender-affirming surgery were documented in the 1960s. The film is a hybrid of documentary and narrative film, shot in a talk show format, with actors inhabiting the roles of historical members of the transgender community found via case studies that Joynt and researcher Kristen Schilt discovered in 2017.

Filming took place over the course of a week, according to Joynt, and additional photography and post-production took place following widespread filming shutdowns due to the pandemic.

Framing Agnes began as a short film, which Joynt says was produced on a “shoestring budget” with help from the Canada Council for the Arts as a proof of concept for the feature-length documentary. “It was kind of a scrappy early beginning that was built on favours of friends and credit cards,” he says.

After the short’s festival run, which included a North American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, Joynt sought Joshi to serve as a producing partner on a feature. The two submitted the film for Telefilm’s Talent to Watch program and it was one of the 31 recipients to receive funding.

Framing Agnes also received funding through the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, COVID-19 emergency relief via Inside Out’s Re:Focus program, as well as investments through the University of Victoria, where Joynt works as an assistant professor, and L.A.-based non-fiction studio XTR.

Paul-Hus says Babysitter sales agent BAC Films will have an opportunity to meet with buyers in-person at the Berlin Film Festival to further attract sales potential.

The film’s sales potential is buoyed by Chokri, whose debut feature A Brother’s Love won the Coup de Coeur Award at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.

Léger previously worked with Paul-Hus on the feature Slut in a Good Way, winning Best Original Screenplay at the Canadian Screen Awards. Paul-Hus says Chokri was interested in boarding as director after seeing the play in 2020.

The film has a budget of approximately $7 million and is co-produced by France’s Phase 4 Productions. The prodco helped raise financing for the feature and handle post-production, according to Paul-Hus, with additional funding also coming from SODEC. Babysitter already has a Canadian distributor through Maison 4:3.

Sundance runs until Jan. 30.