NEW YORK (AP) – Peter Nicks had been documenting students at Oakland High School in California for months when he hit the pandemic.
“He’s in golf,” says a virus student, as he and others die together in a classroom, eagerly contemplating school cancellations.
Soon, the director is heard through the speaker – an announcement that would signal not only the conduct of prom and graduation ceremonies, but possibly Nicks’ film. After chronicling other Oakland institutions, Nicks set out to document a year in the life of multicultural adolescents in Oakland. “Something like ‘The Breakfast Club’ with children of color,” he says.
But how do you make an intimate, observational documentary about school life when the hallways are suddenly emptied, the school musical canceled, and the third act becomes virtual?
“The first order of business was just capturing that moment,” says Nicks, speaking of Zoom in Oakland. “Then, in a short time, it was: What are we going to do? How will we finish this movie? ”
“House Room,” Nicks’ titled and, finally, completed documentary is one of 74 feature films to debut at the Sundance Film Festival starting Thursday. The pandemic turned the annual Park City, Utah festival into a largely virtual event, but also remodeled many of the films that will be developed there.
No festival is an annual cinematic rebirth – a fresh harvest, a new wave – than Sundance. But given the constraints of the March meetings last year, how could filmmakers make their films, be edited and delivered to Sundance?
Most of the films presented this year were shot before the arrival of COVID-19 – many of them being released during quarantine. But there are many directors at the festival who have managed to make the seemingly impossible achievement of making a film in 2020.
A handful of high-quality films made during the pandemic have recently hit streaming platforms, including the robbery comedy “Locked Down” and the story of “Malcolm and Marie.” But Sundance will provide the most complete look at pandemic films. Even in an independent film world based on a working spirit, the results – including “Homeroom”, “How It Ends” and “In the Same Breath” – are often striking for their inventiveness.
With school closed, Nicks sifted through his footage and realized he had a rich thread. The students, responding to a history of police brutality, were pushing for the eradication of officers on the high school campus. Nicks decided to continue production, relying on a mix of images from his students’ own mobile phones and more selective shooting opportunities. “Homeroom” has turned into an adult story, full of activism and protests by George Floyd, which reflects a greater awakening.
“We started to recognize that we had a strong narrative that started at the beginning, we just didn’t realize it,” says Nicks. “That’s one of the reasons I like documentaries – how and why things are revealed. You just have to be more discriminating with the help you render toward other people.
Writers-directors Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein, who are married, have also tried to adapt to the normal Los Angeles pandemic.
“That adjustment brought so much intense emotion,” says Lister-Jones, the actress-director of “The Craft: Legacy” and “Band Aid.” “A lot of fear and vulnerability and a lot of uncertainty not just about the world, but like our future as filmmakers.”
Drawing on their own anxieties and therapy sessions, they began sketching a film about a woman (Lister-Jones) walking around a deserted Los Angeles with her newly visible young self (Cailee Spaeny) on the eve of a huge asteroid apocalypse. . The film is not about the pandemic, but it is clearly a product of the kind of self-reflection it provoked.
“It was kind of experimental in nature, because the world was in an experimental place,” says Lister-Jones.
They called actor friends – Olivia Wilde, Fred Armisen, Helen Hunt, Nick Kroll – for cameos and filmed scenes mainly on courtyards, courtyards and thresholds.
“Some people weren’t prepared,” says Wein. “Some people were very impatient, like, ‘Yes, I’m dying to do something.’ And some people were in the middle, a little scared: “This is my first thing. I didn’t even leave the house. ‘”
Given the emotional mountain road fluctuation of daily life in the pandemic, making a comedy was often difficult – not only logistically, but also emotionally.
“It takes a huge amount of energy to produce a film. Doing this when I was in such a cruel emotional state really terrified me, ”says Lister-Jones. “Many days when I went out to shoot before I said quietly or out loud, ‘I can’t do this.’ By the end of that day, it was so incredible to see the ways he fed me. ”
The Sundance Slate is down from the usual 120 features, but it’s not for lack of references. More than 3,500 feature films were sent. Some were done in a pandemic sprint.
British director Ben Wheatley made “In the Earth”, a horror film about a pandemic during the summer. Carlson Young shot his thriller “The Blazing World” with a skeleton crew in August last year in Texas, quarantined together at a wedding resort. Most of the films made in 2020 are time capsules, but this is explicitly the purpose of Kevin Macdonald’s “Life in a Day 2020”. It consists of 15,000 hours of YouTube footage filmed worldwide in a single day.
Nanfu Wang, a Chinese-born documentary filmmaker based in New Jersey, whose 2019 Sundance Award-winning documentary “One Child Nation” analyzed the personal and widespread amount of China’s one-child policy, did not realize that the movie starts when he did. At first, he continued to take screenshots and record social media posts he saw leaving China in January.
“I saw the information about the virus, about the outbreak being censored in real time,” says Wang. “I would see something and then ten minutes later it would be erased. That forced me to archive them. “
Wang was in the middle of several other projects. At first, she tried to teach what she had gathered on the news. Then he started planning a short film. Then the purpose of the outbreak required a feature film. HBO came on board. Wang also began working with 10 Chinese cinemas to capture the gap between party propaganda and reality.
But more twists and turns followed. The outbreak spread beyond China, and in the US response, Wang saw a different but comparable response from another regime. Soon, she organized film crews in America as well. The goal of “In the Same Breath” has increased.
“The US outbreak shocked me even more than it initially started in China. I had this notion that America is a more advanced society and that such things should not happen in the same way or worse. It changed the movie, “says Wang. “In March, April, I started thinking, OK, now what is the movie about?”
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Follow AP Film writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP