MEMORY, the L.A.-based production and now distribution company featured in Filmmaker‘s 2016 25 New Faces list announced today the release plans for New Strains, a microbudget, camcorder-shot pandemic comedy from a pair of filmmakers, Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan, also featured on our list. The film will screen at the Roxy Cinema in New York (June 13), Nitehawk Cinema Williamsburg (June 15 & 16), and Los Angeles’ Now Instant Image Hall (June 21 & 22), with a North American digital release to follow on Friday, July 19. In New Strains, a pandemic — not necessarily COVID-19 — strands a couple, Kallia […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 10, 2024Along 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