
“Snapshots of a Memory of Our Character”: DP Mia Cioffi Henry on Sorry, Baby

In Eva Victor’s debut feature, a professor, played by Victor herself works to come to terms with her past trauma over a five-year period, which unfolds nonlinearly. The film screens as part of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Dramatic Competition.
Mia Cioffi Henry, best known for The Surrogate and herself a professor, served as the film’s cinematographer. She explicates the challenges of shooting a scene when the director is in front of the camera and how she captured her protagonist’s isolation below.
See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here.
Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job?
Cioffi Henry: This is a bit of a long-winded answer: I had gotten to know the team from Pastel when they were working on Aftersun and was introduced by DP Greg Oke, essentially. When they were developing Sorry, Baby with Eva, they were looking for someone with a specific set of skills to work on the project, as Eva was a first-time director and also starring in the film. My background in narrative features coupled with my career as an educator made it a good fit, and Eva and I clicked immediately. I remember in our first meeting, we chatted for over an hour, and before we got up to leave, Eva handed me a folder of printed reference images they were excited about, and I knew then that our obsessive conversational story prep style was going to work really well together. Two years later, we finally got to make the film.
Filmmaker: What were your artistic goals on this film, and how did you realize them? How did you want your cinematography to enhance the film’s storytelling and treatment of its characters?
Cioffi Henry: The film takes place over the course of five years and all four seasons. We needed to really track the psychology of our character in this nonlinear way, and we did not want to only rely on big technical choices to track the progress of time throughout the film. The film needed to be snapshots of a memory of our character Agnes’s life as she started to unravel in this functional way. Our focus was on portraiture and place: How does Agnes stand out in her surroundings? How does she isolate herself? How does Eva’s subtle performance clue the audience in on what trauma can do to your day-to-day logic, and how can the camera magnify the vice-like hold intrusive thoughts can have on a person?
I maintain that deep story prep and approaching the script first as an actor would, with beat analysis and subtext reading, leads to a strong visual connection to the moments that unfold in the frame. I always want my images to communicate through feeling and not just be expository pictures. Where you place the camera and how you expose the image can give a character agency or strip them of dignity. Understanding that balance is just as important, if not more so, than planning lighting ratios or any other technical aspect.
Filmmaker: Were there any specific influences on your cinematography, whether they be other films, or visual art, or photography, or something else?
Cioffi Henry: We loved looking at the cinematography of the mundane and quotidian. We would watch films like Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women and Showing Up in search of understated camera and lighting work that held the audience’s attention in performance within spaces.
Filmmaker: What were the biggest challenges posed by production to those goals?
Cioffi Henry: Having Eva as both the director and the lead was our most difficult hurdle. I was often wishing we could be sitting together at the monitor watching the scene unfold but instead had to rely on playback between scenes to make sure what we were doing was working. I think we had to really trust ourselves and all of the deep story and character prep we had done, in addition to the shotlisting and blocking work. Eva had to trust me with the visuals as well as to help evaluate performance between takes, which can be a heavy task when there is so much else going on as well, but we had a lot of fun in our little bubble on set! I was also lucky to have a strong lighting and camera team that really understood the unconventional rhythm we established.
Filmmaker: What camera did you shoot on? Why did you choose the camera that you did? What lenses did you use?
Cioffi Henry: We shot on the Alexa Mini LF with Arri Prime DNA lenses. I knew that I wanted a larger format feeling to the image since we would be spending so much time with faces and the subtlety of the performances could be greatly appreciated with this larger format. The Alexa 65 was too big and the workflow too unwieldy for our locations and lower budget, so I was happy to be working with the LF. I think also, after a decade of Alexa Mini, I have just been gravitating towards a slightly different sensor formfactor lately. The combination of the lenses and sensor lent such a soft cinematic look to our film that feels quite effortless and helps to define our character as she deals with her interior demons.
Filmmaker: Describe your approach to lighting.
Cioffi Henry: I was so lucky to work with such a stellar union team in the North Shore of Massachusetts. Gaffer Melanie Nesteruk and key grip Brandon McGinnis were absolute problem solvers every step of the way. Many of our locations were very tiny interiors, and they produced a cinematic naturalism out of our mostly LED lighting package. We would often be working in a space where we would be able to see out of windows in four directions at once, and without the budget for lots of condors or big rigs, we had to create our look with really simple tools, opting to light entire spaces and letting our characters live within them created a stylized type of naturalism.
Filmmaker: What was the most difficult scene to realize and why? And how did you do it?
Cioffi Henry: In the film there is a oner that was designed to be a continuous single take, going from early evening to darkness and traveling over two blocks on Steadicam. Mel and her team hid lights behind every other building, in driveways and on neighbors’ porches so that we could get the long take moving shot without seeing any lights or stands. Our camera operator, Dean Egan, did an incredible job analysing the shot with us after every take as we would choreograph the movement between lighting stands and camera shadows until we pulled it off. I think we got five takes, and the second one was the winner.
Filmmaker: Finally, describe the finishing of the film. How much of your look was “baked in” versus realized in the DI?
Cioffi Henry: Marcy Robinson at Nice Shoes colored this film brilliantly, and we all had such a great time in the room together with Eva. I love working with Marcy because she comes from a photochemical darkroom background. I shoot a lot of film, so our communication is really seamless. Macy also always takes the time to really appreciate the story and the creative process that has led to the film ending up in the DI. It becomes less about fixing the mistakes or inconsistencies that were made on set and more about enhancing and furthering the story as we intended. I don’t typically shoot with custom LUTs because I find them distracting to my exposure process. I like to use the tools on the day to create the colors and lighting ratios as close as possible to how I envision the final film and then polish and bring it to life in the DI.
TECH BOX
Film Title: Sorry, Baby
Camera: Alexa Mini LF
Lenses: ARRI Rental Prime DNA lenses
Lighting: LEDs, Arri, Astera, Aperture, Rosco
Color Grading: Marcy Robinson at Nice Shoes, NYC | DaVinci Resolve