Sundance 2020 News: Amazon Studios Picks Up Eugene Ashe’s ‘Sylvie’s Love’ Starring Tessa Thompson

Variety is reporting that “Sylvie’s Love,” writer-director Eugene Ashe’s period drama about a romance between an aspiring television producer and a talented saxophonist, has sold to Amazon Studios out of this year’s Sundance film festival. The film stars Tessa Thompson and Nnamdi Asomugha. The sale, brokered by Endeavor Content on behalf of the filmmakers, closed in the high seven-figure range, insiders added.

Written and directed by Eugene Ashe, the cast includes Tessa Thompson, Nnamdi Asomugha, Ryan Michelle Bathe, Regé-Jean Page, Eva Longoria, Aja Naomi King, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Jemima Kirke, Alano Miller, MC Lyte, Tone Bell, Erica Gimpel, John Magaro, and Lance Redick.

Set in ’50s and ’60s New York City, the story follows aspiring television producer Sylvie (Thompson) as she meets aspiring saxophonist Robert (Asomugha) when he takes a job at her father’s record store in Harlem. After a summer romance that comes to an end, the two fatefully reconnect several years later and find that their feelings for each other have never disappeared.

“They don’t make ’em like this any more, innocent and escapist and scrubbed clean of contact with real grubby life. But then, given the poor history of black representation in the Hollywood movies of the Golden Age, ‘they’ never really did,” wrote Variety critic Jessica Kiang in her review from Park City, “and perhaps this small act of retroactive redress is enough of a reason to make such a wildly old-fashioned, fantasy-bubble period romance.”

Thompson produced the period drama, along with Asomugha through his iAm21 Entertainment and Jonathan Baker (The Banker), Gabrielle Glore (Dirty Laundry) and Matthew Thurm (Crown Heights). The cinematographer is Declan Quinn (Rachel Getting Married, Leaving Las Vegas).