NEW YORK – Peter Nicks had for months been reporting on Oakland High School students, in California, when the pandemic struck.
“He’s in the Bay,” said one student of the virus as he and others grind together in a classroom, eagerly considering dropping out of school.
Soon, the principle will be heard over the speaker – a publication that would celebrate not only scuttling prom and graduation ceremonies, but, perhaps, a Nicks film. After blaming other establishments in Oakland, Nicks had recorded a year in the life of Oakland’s multicultural teenagers. “Something like ‘The Breakfast Club’ with kids of color,” he says.
But how do you make a close – up, sensitive documentary about school life when the halls are suddenly emptied, school music is turned off and your third act turns meaningful?
“The first business order just captured that moment,” says Nicks, speaking with Zoom from Oakland. “Then shortly after that it was: What are we going to do? How are we going to finish this film? ”
“Homeroom,” aptly titled – and eventually finished – is one of the 74 feature films to appear at the Sundance Film Festival starting Thursday. The pandemic has transformed Utah ‘s annual Park City festival into a largely meaningful event, but it has also released many of the films there.
No larger festival represents an annual cinematic rebirth – a new crop, a new wave – than Sundance. But with the restrictions on collections from March last year, how could filmmakers get them made, edited and delivered to Sundance?
Most of the films shown this year were shot before COVID-19 arrived – many of them edited during quarantine. But there are a lot of filmmakers at the festival who ruled the action that is similar to making a film in 2020.
A handful of popular films made during the pandemic have hit streaming platforms, including the heist comedy “Locked Down” and the romance “Malcolm & Marie.” But Sundance will still provide the most complete view of filmmaking under the epidemic. Even in the world of independent film based on a capable spirit, the results – including “Homeroom,” “How It Ends” and “In the Same Breath” – often go on strike for convenience. in which they are.
When school was closed, Nicks moved through his film and realized that he had a rich thread. The students, responding to a history of police brutality, had been pushing for the removal of officers from the high school campus. Nicks decided to keep doing it, relying on a combination of the students ’own cell phone pictures and more selective shooting opportunities. “Homeroom” went into an age-old story, full of George Floyd’s action and protests, which showed a greater awakening.
“We started to recognize that we had a powerful statement that started first, we didn’t understand it,” Nicks said. “That’s part of why I love documentaries – how and why things are published. You need to be open to making and seeing these changes. ”
Writers-in-residence Zoe Lister-Jones and married Daryl Wein were also trying to embrace the pandemic norm in Los Angeles.
“That change was very emotional,” said Lister-Jones, the filmmaker of The Craft: Legacy and Band Aid. ”“ There is a lot of fear and vulnerability and a lot of uncertainty not just about the world but what we were like as filmmakers. ”
Drawing from their own anxieties and treatment sessions, they began filming a film about a woman (Lister-Jones) walking around a deserted Los Angeles with her younger self-image visible ( Cailee Spaeny), on the eve of an upcoming asteroid apocalypse. The film is not about the pandemic, but it is clear that it was the result of such self-reflection.
“It was a bit experimental in nature because the world was in an experimental place,” says Lister-Jones.
They nominated actress friends – Olivia Wilde, Fred Armisen, Helen Hunt, Nick Kroll – for cameos, and usually shot scenes on patios, backyards and porches.
“Some people weren’t ready,” said Wein. “Some people were very enthusiastic, like: ‘Yes, I’m dying to do something.’ And there were some kind people in the middle, a little scary, ‘This is going to be my first thing. I haven’t even left the house. ‘”
With the volatile emotional roller in the daily life of the pandemic, it was often difficult to make comedy – not only logically but emotionally.
“It takes a lot of energy to make a film. Doing so when we were in such a crude state made me very scared, ”said Lister-Jones. “Many days when we went out hunting before I could say quietly or loudly, ‘I can’t do it. ‘By the end of that day, it was so amazing the ways he fed me. “
Sundance slate is down from the standard 120 features, but not for lack of applications. Over 3,500 feature films were submitted. Some were done in a pandemic sprint.
British filmmaker Ben Wheatley made “In the Earth,” a horror film set in the summer epidemic. Carlson Young shot the terrifying thrush “The Blazing World” with a skeleton team last August in Texas, with the team quarantined together at a wedding center. Most of the films made in 2020 are time capsules but that is specifically the purpose of “Life in a Day 2020” by Kevin Macdonald. It is made up of 15,000 hours of YouTube images burned around the world in a single day.
Nanfu Wang, the New Jersey-based Chinese-born reporter who made the 2019 Sundance “One Child Nation” award-winning documentary did not analyze the personal and broad hole of China’s one-child policy she realized she was starting a film when she did. At first, she just kept taking screenshots and recording social media posts that she saw coming out of China in January.
“I saw the information about the virus, about the conduct of the censorship in real time,” Wang said. “I would see something and then ten minutes later it would be erased. That made me invest. ”
Wang was at the center of several other projects. First, she tried to send out what she had collected to news outlets. Then she started designing a short film. Then a special film needed the scope of the revolution. HBO came on board. And Wang began working with 10 cinematographers in China to bridge the yawning gap between party propaganda and reality.
But more turns followed, of course. The uprising spread beyond China, and in the U.S. response, Wang saw a different but comparable virus response from another regime. Soon she was organizing film crews in America, too. The space grew “In the same breath”.
“The US revolution surprised me even more than it did in China. I believed that America is a more progressive society and things like that should not happen in the same way or worse. He changed the film, ”said Wang. “In March, April, I started thinking: Okay, now what is the film about?”
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Follow AP film writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP