Along with their baby and an AI-generated poster, filmmakers Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan recently brought their debut feature, New Strains, to the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it won a Special Jury prize. The film is about a couple who travel to New York just prior to the start of a worldwide pandemic and, holed up in a relative’s apartment, descend “into a toxic pattern of spite, jealousy and miserable co-dependence, wrote Vadim Rizov in our 25 New Face profile of the filmmakers. “Wryly funny and cuttingly satirical, New Strains has the rare distinction of being a pandemic film that actually […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 9, 2023For their Rotterdam-premiering feature New Strains‘s poster, Prashanth Kamalakanthan and Artemis Shaw knew they didn’t want to use an actual image from their pandemic production, which was shot on Hi-8. And they wanted an image that in addition to being beautiful would formally resonate with the film itself, a story of visiting young lovers (played by the filmmakers) stuck in New York when a travel ban hits at the start of a pandemic. “We were thinking about that sense of being frozen in time,” Shaw says. “In March, 2020, everyone was obsessed with the news, but we were all stuck […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 20, 2023