EXCLUSIVE: On the heels of his latest characteristic Radical‘s Festival Favorite Award win at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, filmmaker Christopher Zalla has inked with Entertainment 360 for administration.
Zalla wrote and directed the critically acclaimed drama, primarily based on a 2013 article written for Wired journal by Josh Davis, which was among the many most mentioned titles at Sundance 2023. The movie relies on the true story of Sergio Juarez Correa (CODA‘s Eugenio Derbez), a teacher in the neglected town of Matamoros, Mexico, who as Zalla notes in his director’s assertion, suffered “a mental breakdown” after “increasingly failing to reach his students in each successive year.” When Correa stumbled upon “a new kind of child-directed learning” in a TED Talk, he determined to attempt to implement it, with a purpose to flip the state of affairs in his classroom round, to profound outcomes.
Zalla related to this story personally, as somebody who’d seemed to start out anew in his craft when he moved his household from NYC to Guatemala, following “two grueling years in and out of hospitals” when his baby was born untimely. “Sergio was winging it. And just like I had he decided to hit the reset button on his life and take a new approach that would allow him to reconnect to his passion and purpose,” says the filmmaker. “I found this, together with the actual methodology he employed, of letting the children decide what they would learn about, to be so vulnerable, so honest, so naked…that I knew it would be the heart of the film, and the principle around which it could be organized.”
While specifics as to launch plans for Radical haven’t but emerged, sources inform Deadline that it’s going to bow within the fall.
Zalla beforehand wrote and directed the thriller Blood of My Blood, seeing his debut characteristic win Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and rating Independent Spirit Award nominations for Best Screenplay and Best First Feature. He additionally helmed the Lifetime TV film Beautiful & Twisted, starring Rob Lowe, Paz Vega and Candice Bergen, and has directed episodes of Law & Order in addition to its spin-offs SVU and Criminal Intent.
Born in Kenya and raised between Bolivia and Kentucky, Zalla has lectured on screenwriting at Harvard University and taught as an adjunct Professor of Directing at Columbia University’s Graduate Film School, the place he beforehand obtained an MFA with Honors in Directing. He continues to be represented by legal professional Andrew Hurwitz at Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz.
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