This year’s SCAD Savannah Film Festival – the “largest university-run film festival in the world,” which ran from October 23-30 – was a conveniently hybrid event that also marked my own return to the in-person festival circuit. Admittedly, as someone residing in a blue state with a strict mask mandate in place, traveling to the Deep South was a somewhat disorienting experience. And a stark reminder that the U.S.’s politicization of a global pandemic really is a war within – and specifically within the states themselves. On the one hand, Georgia’s Republican Governor Kemp issued an executive order back in […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 4, 2021Deftly merging animation and documentary, Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee tells the true story of a gay Afghan refugee living in Copenhagen since being granted asylum. Art director Jess Nicholls shares how they protected their subject, Amin’s (a pseudonym), identity through the unbounded use of animation, and how to tell a true story through unique mediums. 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? Nicholls: Just to clarify, I’m not a cinematographer but an art director as Flee is an animated […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 31, 2021How did events of 2020—any of them—change your film, either in the way you approached it, produced it, post-produced it, or are now thinking about it? I was in Oslo, Norway finalizing Flee, when the Danish Prime Minister went on TV calling for a national lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I made it home to Copenhagen just before the borders closed and from there it felt like everything went into slow motion. The very final steps of finishing the film took as long as the rest of the entire production, and as all the cinemas around me had closed […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 28, 2021