What can we expect from Kris­ten Stewart’s direc­to­r­i­al debut?

A short film about ​“a guy on the ocean floor”, Kris­ten Stewart’s direc­to­r­i­al debut Come Swim is set to debut at this year’s Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val. Hav­ing become the first Amer­i­can actor to win a Cesar Award for her superla­tive turn in Olivi­er Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria, it seems Stew­art is now keen to cap­i­talise on her indie cred – but what should can we expect from her first stint behind the camera?

A 10-sec­ond teas­er trail­er show­ing a man sub­merged in water doesn’t give away much, but the 17-minute short sounds like an ambi­tious first for­ay into film­mak­ing for Stew­art. ​“It’s not a small movie,” she recent­ly told Dead­line. ​“It’s not like actors in a room talk­ing to each oth­er which you would def­i­nite­ly expect an actor to start off with myself too. Why did I make my first expe­ri­ence so dif­fi­cult? I’m a lit­tle masochistic.”

Star­ring Josh Kaye, an unknown actor who caught Stewart’s eye, Come Swim is being billed as a metaphor­i­cal and visu­al­ly poet­i­cal exam­i­na­tion into, ​“the ways in which you com­plete­ly aggran­dise your own pain.” Much is being made of the edit­ing tech­niques used in the film to cap­ture the man liv­ing on the ocean’s floor, with Stew­art report­ed­ly eschew­ing CGI. A research paper co-authored by Stew­art her­self enti­tled, ​‘Bring­ing Impres­sion­ism to Life with Neur­al Style Trans­fer in Come Swim’, explains the tech­nol­o­gy which is said to allow paint­ed images to be trans­lat­ed into film.

We’ll have to wait and see whether Stewart’s dive into the deep end pays off, but it’s encour­ag­ing that Assayas has appar­ent­ly giv­en the film his seal of approval. With Kel­ly Reichardt’s Cer­tain Women, and Assayas’ Per­son­al Shop­per set for release over the next few months, Stew­art is build­ing on her rep­u­ta­tion as one of the most inter­est­ing young tal­ents in the film indus­try right now.