Tania Anderson
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Sundance 2022 Critic’s Notebook: The Mission, Utama
The beginning of Tania Anderson’s The Mission transported me from my virtual festival cocoon to Utah’s snowy slopes and the towns below; the ambient Mormonism emanating from those surroundings is a shadow structure of any IRL Sundance. Anderson’s debut feature documentary invites viewers to observe the nice-seeming young men and women dispatched from there to proselytize on behalf of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The opening introduces four main subjects—two male, two female—preparing to separate from their families for a two-year term, beginning with nine weeks of missionary training camp in Provo. From there, they’re sent to Finland, whose total […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 27, 2022 -
“LDS Folk Are the Same Whether They’re North Americans or Finns”: Tania Anderson on Her Sundance-Debuting Doc The Mission
World premiering January 24th in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at this year’s Sundance, The Mission marks the feature-length doc debut of Helsinki-based writer and journalist Tania Anderson, who, on a cold winter day back in 2016, happened to pass by a pair of English-speaking young men in familiar suits discussing the perils of temptation. Which prompted the open-minded British-Swiss-American to wonder not, “What the heck are Mormon missionaries doing in Finland?” (my first question), but “What makes them tick?” And from this combination of curiosity and accidental eavesdropping the idea for The Mission was born. To find out more about the film, which […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 24, 2022 -
“You’ve Got to Roll With the Punches” | Tania Anderson, The Mission
The last two years have prompted much contemplation and reconsideration of the reasons why we make our films as well as the ways in which we make them. What aspect of your filmmaking—whether in your creative process, the way you finance your films, your production methodology or the way you relate to your audience—did you have to reinvent in order to make and complete the film you are bringing to the festival this year? When COVID first hit, we had been filming the young missionaries in our film for seven months. We had 17 to go. At that time, it […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 24, 2022
