Gabo Arora
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“I Miss 35mm Films the Most:” Gabo Arora on Not Watching Movies
In April, as we began to put together the Summer, 2020 issue of Filmmaker, we asked directors, cinematographers, editors and other film workers to send us their thoughts on the quarantine and their own creative lives. The responses printed here were collected from April through mid-June — personal statements that speak variously to individual filmmaking practices, films halted mid-production, politics, art and life. Read all the responses here. — Editor I miss 35mm films the most. Especially as my new wife and I have a strict no-streaming policy at home that we had in place pre-COVID. We didn’t want to turn […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 8, 2020 -
“We Used Chaos to Clarify Our Senses and Capture True Harmony and Beauty”: Gabo Arora | Zikr: A Sufi Revival
As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? There is always chaos at the heart of any creative endeavor, and when I left for Tunisia last year with a team of experiential visionaries to capture Sufi rituals, we needed to fully embrace it. We landed with only a rough idea of what we wanted to accomplish, along with a Tunisian fixer I randomly met […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 1, 2018 -
Making VR that Matters: Johns Hopkins’ New Immersive Storytelling and Emerging Technologies Program
In last summer’s print issue of Filmmaker I wrote about the ways that university film and computer science departments are adapting to teach virtual and augmented reality in their classrooms. In schools all over the world, students are finding ways to use VR and AR to create narrative films, documentaries, animation and games as aids in therapy, medicine, architecture and innumerable other fields. Now the newest school to launch a program is Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where a graduate level Immersive Storytelling and Emerging Technologies Program is beginning in January. Headed by filmmaker Gabo Arora under the direction of Roberto Busó-García, the Director […]
by Randy Astle on Nov 22, 2017 -
IFP Film Week: Gabo Arora and the UN’s First Virtual Reality App
“We’re great with empathy, but we really want action because we’re the UN. We need to shift the needle on things,” said filmmaker and United Nations creative director Gabo Arora about the UN’s first virtual reality app, UNVR, which launches today. The app launches with four VR films, including Clouds Over Sidra, which was created by Arora and filmmaker Chris Milk as a collaboration between the UN Millennium Campaign and UNICEF Jordan. Shot at the Zaatari refugee camp, Clouds Over Sidra tells the story of life inside the camp through the eyes of a 12-year-old girl named Sidra. The Sidra Project, which uses the […]
by Paula Bernstein on Sep 15, 2016
