EXCLUSIVE: On the heels of his newest feature Radical‘s Festival Favorite Award win at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, filmmaker Christopher Zalla has inked with Entertainment 360 for management.
Zalla wrote and directed the critically acclaimed drama, based on a 2013 article written for Wired magazine by Josh Davis, which was among the most discussed titles at Sundance 2023. The film is based 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 statement, 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 decided to try to implement it, in order to turn the situation in his classroom around, to profound results.
Zalla connected to this story personally, as someone who’d looked to start anew in his craft when he moved his family from NYC to Guatemala, following “two grueling years in and out of hospitals” when his child was born premature. “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 release plans for Radical haven’t yet emerged, sources tell Deadline that it will bow in the fall.
Zalla previously wrote and directed the thriller Blood of My Blood, seeing his debut feature win Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and score Independent Spirit Award nominations for Best Screenplay and Best First Feature. He also helmed the Lifetime TV movie Beautiful & Twisted, starring Rob Lowe, Paz Vega and Candice Bergen, and has directed episodes of Law & Order as well as 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, where he previously received an MFA with Honors in Directing. He continues to be represented by attorney Andrew Hurwitz at Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz.
