Riffing on the eponymous stock trope recognizable in so many American films, The American Society of Magical Negroes tells the story of Aren, the latest recruit to a secret society of magical Black people who use their powers to make the lives of white people easier. The Sundance 2024 premiere is the debut film for director Kobi Libii. The film’s cinematographer Doug Emmett has a number of recognizable credits under his belt, including The Edge of Seventeen and Sorry to Bother You. Below, he humorously recounts difficulties mounting a set three floors underground and details the inspirations behind the film’s look. See all responses to […]
Silje Evensmo Jacobsen’s A New Kind of Wilderness is a film structured in a way I’ve not seen before. With a title that likewise could apply to the psychic space into which the audience is thrust, the rural Norway-set doc is an intimate, first-person narrated, cinematic essay from a director whose story it is not. Indeed, straight from its bold opening, the viewer is left abruptly disoriented, forever second-guessing whose eyes we are actually looking through. It’s a deft structural feat that in turn emotionally transports us into the shoes of the free-spirited, forest-dwelling – and above all grieving – Payne family, five […]
Winner of Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize in 2004, Ondi Timoner’s DIG! used the developing careers of indie rock bands The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre to examine the complex, often incompatible relationship between art and commerce, as well as the one between the bands’ frontmen. Now, Dig! XX revisits the story, digitally remastered and enhanced and complete with an additional 35 minutes of footage. Below, Editor David Timoner, Ondi Timoner’s brother and frequent collaborator, discusses revisiting his first major project and how he sought to improve it for its twentieth anniversary. See all responses to our annual Sundance […]
In The Outrun, a London woman’s return to Scotland’s Orkney Islands as she attempts to reconcile herself with the past and her drug addictions. Based on the bestselling memoir by Amy Liptrot and directed by Nora Fingscheidt (The Unforgivable, System Crasher), the film includes on-location shooting in both London and on Orkney. Below, cinematographer Yunus Roy Imer recounts the difficulty of shooting a harsh Orkney winter during the summer and explains the various cameras and lenses he used to make sure the look of the film was always perfect. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here. Filmmaker: How […]
Joseph Krings (Galveston, Captain Fantastic) is the credited editor on two films at Sundance this year: the sci-fi animated Love Me, starring Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, and Winner, a biopic about Reality Winner, the imprisoned whistleblower who leaked NSA documents related to Russian interference in the 2016 election. Below, Krings discusses both films at length, touching on the challenges of editing a film that is going to be heavily reworked in animation, finding the right balance between tragedy and gallows humor, and the peculiar VFX challenges of both films. See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews here. Filmmaker: […]
Sujo, the Sundance 2024 World Cinema Dramatic Competition premiere directed by Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez, follows the life of a Mexican boy who is orphaned when his father, a cartel gunman, is killed. Below, cinematographer Ximena Amann, who also shot Rondero’s previous film, The Darkest Days of Us, discusses the challenges and delights of working with children and shooting in a protected natural area with minimal equipment. 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 […]
In Sujo, co-directed by Astrid Rondero (The Darkest Days of Us) and Fernanda Valadez (Identifying Features) and premiering at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival as part of the World Cinema Dramatic Competition, the eponymous child is left orphaned when his father, a cartel gunman, is killed. The film then follows the turbulence that echoes throughout his life as he grows older. The film’s editor, Susan Korda, is best known for the Oscar-nominated For All Mankind, but she also edited Rondero’s The Darkest Days of Us and Valadez’s Identifying Features. Rondero and Valadez also worked on each other’s films, making this […]
In the U.S. Dramatic Competition film Didi, the feature debut of writer-director Sean Wang, a Taiwanese American boy learns to skate handle the emotions of adolescent longing in the summer before high school. Set in 2008, the film is replete with period signifiers familiar to any child of the era, including MySpace friend rankings, AIM messaging, and Windows XP. In her discussion of Didi below, editor Arielle Zakowski, whose most recent credit is the 2023 computer screen film Missing, explains the importance of test screenings and how she brought the film’s period setting to life and contrasted the excitement of the […]
In the Sundance 2024 Midnight premiere It’s What’s Inside, the feature debut of writer-director Greg Jardin, an uninvited guest with a mysterious suitcase derails a pre-wedding party. The film’s colorful visual palette, realized by Kevin Fletcher, echoes the high-octane nature of the plot. Below, Fletcher shares some of the influences on the film’s distinct look and extols the virtues of preparatory work. 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 […]
Though 2024 marks seven decades since the passing of Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, it often feels as if the ubiquitous artist never actually died (or lived) at all. A feminist/Chicana/indigenous/disabled/nonbinary icon ahead of her (if not outside the concept of) time, Frida Kahlo has long been celebrated as more phantasmagoric myth than flesh-and-blood painter (as opposed to her corporeal hubby Diego Rivera). Indeed, the visage that first radiated from her own canvas has since reverberated — and been commercialized — down through the ages. (One of many ironies in the lives of the staunchly communist couple who traveled […]