Sundance Responses
-
“We Could Have Easily Ended Up Without Any Protagonists” | Jakub Piątek, Pianoforte
Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? One of the obvious obstacles for us was lockdown. We are telling a mosaic story with different protagonists and, during the process, we found out that we couldn’t visit some of them because of COVID and really long quarantines in some countries. We asked our friends from the Film School in Łódź for help and built local teams to replace […]
-
“Luckily, the Actor Tested Negative” | Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman, Theater Camp
Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? We were on an extremely tight 19-day schedule with a large cast of children who had limited hours they could work. The cameras basically had to be constantly rolling to maximize every second. One day, there was a COVID scare that put a two-hour hole in our day. We spontaneously made up a scene where our characters are writing the […]
-
“Nothing Is Harder To Shoot Than a Dinner Party” | Ira Sachs, Passages
Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? For weeks before production, the film’s cinematographer Josée Deshaies and I begin a long process of creating a storyboard for the film. At some point, after we’ve established our own rhythm, we invite an illustrator—in this case, our production manager Marianne Germain’s brother Gabriel—to join us to translate our conversations into images. The work of the three of us then […]
-
“Oklahoma Hit a Spike in COVID Cases” | Erica Tremblay, Fancy Dance
Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? When we started production on Fancy Dance, we had originally planned to shoot our powwow scene at a community powwow, but as the shoot dates got closer, Oklahoma hit a spike in COVID cases and we were forced to rethink our plan. With COVID protocols in place, the only way to safely shoot the scene was to throw our own […]
-
“We Saw This Actor Completely Detach From the Project” | Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, The Eight Mountains
Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? Our film was almost entirely shot in the Italian Alps and we knew this would be demanding. Because of the hard logistics of getting to our locations, the height at which we would be filming and because of the weather. The crew needed to be up for an adventure, and so did the cast. We only realized how true this […]
-
“We Began To See the Zoom Calls as a Kind of ‘Virtual Vérité'” | Laura Gabbert, Food and Country
Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? As COVID took hold in March 2020, we knew we had to capture Ruth Reichl’s journey chronicling the food security story unfolding in real time. But, unable to travel, how would we solve the problem of distance: the miles and miles lying between her and her subjects, and the continent between her, in upstate New York, and our crew, in […]
-
“It Was a Blessing in Disguise To Have More Time” | Thembi Banks, Young. Wild. Free.
Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? On March 11, 2020, we shot and completed our first day of principal photography of Young. Wild. Free. On March 12…well, you know what happened that day. Our entire industry and the rest of the world shut down because of COVID. I, along with the rest of the producers who had worked so hard to get to the point of […]
-
“I Wanted To Face History So That I Could Understand It” | Milisuthando Bongela, Milisuthando
Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? Our film has a lot of rare, never-before-seen propaganda footage of apartheid that we were given, kind of in secret, by people who had access to it and wanted to share it with “the right people.” The footage itself was emotionally very challenging, as this was hours of footage of the planning and execution of apartheid by its masterminds. What […]
-
“Augusto Was No Longer Communicating as Before” | Maite Alberdi, The Eternal Memory
Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? The most unexpected—or the most difficult—part of the film was the uncertainty of when to finish filming it. Of course, it’s always very difficult to end the recording of a documentary. But this was a film that when we started, we didn’t know when it would be [finished], and that was the main question. When the day came, and Augusto […]
-
“Our Equipment Partner Pulled Out of the Project With No Explanation” | C.J. Obasi, Mami Wata
Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? The biggest challenge we faced came at the very beginning of our shoot. The cast and crew had all arrived at the camp, and we were smack in the middle of rehearsals, building sets, finalizing costumes, etc. Then our equipment partner pulled out of the project with no explanation. So here we are, in a remote community in the Republic […]
