Sundance Film Festival 2023
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“I Use Split Screens as a Tool for Ensuring Any Performance Can Be Used”: Editor Franklin Peterson on Fair Play
The subject of a bidding war after its premiere before selling to Netflix for a reported $20 million, Chloe Domont’s twisty thriller Fair Play owes much to the work of editor Franklin Peterson in establishing the deliberate pace necessary to suck viewers in. Below, he offers (spoiler-free!) insights on his work on the film. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Peterson: I was offered an interview with Chloe, the writer-director, for the position, as she responded to my […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2023 -
“Alexa Mini, My Best Friend in Digital Cinematography”: DP Josée Deshais on Passages
One of the best-reviewed films at this year’s Sundance, Ira Sachs’s Passages sold to MUBI for four territories, including the US and UK, shortly after its premiere. The drama is fueled by the love triangle that emerges when film director Tomas (Franz Rogowski) cheats on artist husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) with teacher Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). The Paris-set drama marks Sachs’s first time working with French cinematographer Josée Deshais (Saint Laurent), who discusses her work on the film below. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? Deshais: Ira approached me because of a French film I […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2023 -
“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 […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2023 -
“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 […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2023 -
“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 […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2023 -
“The Sociohistorical Significance of a Black African Woman Holding the Camera in Her Hands”: DP Hankyeol Lee on Milisuthando
As both the editor and cinematographer of Milisuthando, the debut feature by Milisuthando Bongela, multimedia artist Hankyeol Lee confronted a unique set of challenges. In a film that blends a large quantity of archival material with material shot by the director herself, Lee’s footage was one of many types of footage in the mix. Below, Lee discusses her work on the film as a cinematographer. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? Lee: I first came onto the project as an editor. Milisuthando Bongela, the director, was looking for someone to edit a trailer for […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2023 -
“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 […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2023 -
Sundance 2023: The Eternal Memory, Joonam
In the first scene of The Eternal Memory, Augusto Góngora’s loving wife Paulina Urrutia wakes him and fills him, and viewers, in on what’s going on: she’s an actress, they’ve been married for some time, he has Alzheimer’s. It’s easy to imagine that, for obvious reasons, they have this exchange a lot; for a certain kind of conscientious documentarian who wants expository information without staging it, Alzheimer’s might function as a sort of present, insofar as it provides an organic reason to have characters reiterate the same facts daily until the right delivery has been captured. In Maite Alberdi’s documentary, Góngora first […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 25, 2023 -
“What Remains in the Body”: Maite Alberdi on The Eternal Memory
Oscar nominee and Sundance alum Maite Alberdi (with 2020’s surprisingly lighthearted The Mole Agent, which followed an endearing octogenarian with no private investigative skills on an undercover mission to expose retirement home elder abuse) returned to Park City this year with a much different follow-up. While The Eternal Memory likewise deals with both the joys and indignities of aging, Alberdi trains her lens this time on a dynamic duo who’ve been together for a quarter century, much of it in the media spotlight. Paulina Urrutia was (and still is) an actor and former State Minister, while Augusto Góngora was one of Chile’s most […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 25, 2023 -
“We Underestimated the Violence of the Regime”: Lina on 5 Seasons of Revolution
Like most conflicts heavily documentedby Western media, the ongoing Syrian civil war is one in which nearly all nuance has been left on the cutting room floor. Fortunately, Lina’s 5 Seasons of Revolution, a revelatory Sundance debut from a Damascus video journalist who (for safety reasons) goes simply by her first name, shatters the trend. Currently based in Europe, Lina spent 2011-2015 filming her country’s path from high revolutionary hopes to ultimately shattered dreams. But even more importantly, she did so in the most personal and truthful way, by turning the camera on herself and four of her closest friends—all educated, […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 25, 2023
