NEW YORK (AP) – Peter Nicks has been documenting the pupils of Oakland High School in California for months when the pandemic hit.
‘It’s in the Bay,’ says one student of the virus as he and others grind together in a classroom and excitedly consider canceling school.
Soon the principal will be heard over the loudspeaker – an announcement that will indicate not only a sign of celebrities and graduation ceremonies, but possibly also the movie of Nicks. Nicks documented a year in the life of Oakland’s multicultural teens after checking out other Oakland institutions. “Something like ‘The Breakfast Club’ with toddlers,” he says.
But how do you make an intimate observational documentary about school life when the corridors are suddenly emptied, the school musical is canceled and your third act becomes virtual?
“The first order was just capturing that moment,” Nicks says, speaking of Zoom from Oakland. Shortly afterwards it was: what are we going to do? How are we going to possibly complete this film? ”
“Homeroom,” The apt title – and finally completed – by Nicks, Nicks is one of the 74 feature films that begin at the Sundance Film Festival on Thursday.. The pandemic turned the annual Park City, Utah, festival into a largely virtual event, but it also reformed many of the films that will be played there.
No more festival represents an annual film birth – a fresh harvest, a new wave – as Sundance. But given the restrictions on events since March last year, how can filmmakers have their films made, processed and delivered at Sundance?
Most of the films shown this year were shot before the arrival of COVID-19 – many of which were processed during the quarantine. But there are numerous filmmakers at the festival who have managed the seemingly impossible feat of making a film in 2020.
A handful of sensational films made during the pandemic have recently hit streaming platforms, including the heist comedy “Locked Down” and the romance “Malcolm & Marie.” But Sundance still offers the complete look of producing films under the pandemic. Even in an independent film world based on a can-mind, the results – including “Homeroom”, “How It Ends” and “In the Same Breath” – are often striking for their ingenuity.
With the school closed, Nicks sifted through his footage and realized he had a rich thread. The students responded to a history of police brutality and helped eradicate high school campus officers. Nicks decided to continue production and relied on a mix of the students’ own cell phone material and more selective shooting opportunities. ‘Homeroom’ turns into a story of coming of age, littered with activism and George Floyd protests, reflecting a greater awakening.
“We realized we had a powerful story that started in the beginning, we just didn’t realize it,” Nicks says. ‘That’s part of why I like documentaries – how and why things are revealed. You just have to be open to making the adjustments and see it. ”
Writer-directors Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein, who are married, also tried to adjust to the normal pandemic in Los Angeles.
“The adaptation has evoked so many intense emotions,” says Lister-Jones, the actress-producer of ‘The Craft: Legacy’ and ‘Band Aid’. “A lot of fear and vulnerability and a lot of uncertainty not only about the world, but also what our future as filmmakers will look like.”
Based on their own worries and therapy sessions, they began setting out a film about a woman (Lister-Jones) walking around an abandoned Los Angeles with her newly visible younger self (Cailee Spaeny), on the eve of an impending asteroid apocalypse. The film is not about the pandemic, but it is clearly a product of the kind of self-reflection it brought with it.
“It was kind of experimental in nature because the world was in an experimental place,” says Lister-Jones.
They gathered actor friends – Olivia Wilde, Fred Armisen, Helen Hunt, Nick Kroll – for cameo people and mostly shot scenes on patios, backyards and thresholds.
“Some people weren’t ready yet,” Wein says. “Some people were very eager, like, ‘Yes, I want to do something.’ And some people were kind of in the middle, a little scared: ‘This is my first thing. I have not even left the house yet. ”
Given the ever-changing emotional rollercoaster of daily life in the pandemic, making a comedy was often difficult – not only logistically, but also emotionally.
‘It takes a lot of energy to make a film. Doing so when we were in such a raw emotional state really scared me, ‘says Lister-Jones. “Many days when we went shooting, I said quietly or out loud, ‘I can’t do this. ‘At the end of that day, it was so amazing to see how it fed me. ”
Sundance’s slate is down from the usual 120 features, but that’s not because of a lack of submissions. More than 3,500 feature films were submitted. Some were made in a pandemic sprint.
British filmmaker Ben Wheatley made ‘In the Earth’ during the summer, a horror film set in the pandemic. Carlson Young shot her fantasy-horror thriller “The Blazing World” with a skeleton crew in Texas last August, with the cast in a wedding resort. Most movies made in 2020 are time capsules, but that’s explicitly the goal of Kevin Macdonald’s “Life in a Day 2020”. It consists of 15,000 hours of YouTube recordings shot worldwide in one day.
Nanfu Wang, the Chinese-born New Jersey-based documentary and with his Sundance Award-winning documentary “One Child Nation,” which analyzes the personal and widespread toll of China’s one-child policy in 2019, did not realize she was a movie started when she did. Initially, she just kept taking screenshots and recording social media posts she saw from China in January.
“I saw the information about the virus, and the intellectual censorship of the outbreak,” Wang said. ‘I would see something and then ten minutes later it would be removed. It forced me to archive them. ”
Wang was in the middle of several other projects. Initially, she tried to pass on what she had gathered to news sources. Then she started planning a short film. Then the scale of the outbreak necessitated a feature film. HBO came on board. And Wang began working with ten cinematographers in China to bridge the gap between party propaganda and reality.
But more twists and turns followed, of course. The outbreak spread outside China, and in the US response, Wang saw a different but similar virus response from another regime. Soon she was also organizing film crews in America. The scope of “In the same breath” has increased.
‘The outbreak in the US shocked me even more than it originally started in China. I thought that America is a more advanced society and that such things should not happen in the same or worse way. It changed the film, ”says Wang. “In March, April, I started thinking: OK, what’s the movie about now?”
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Follow AP Filmmaker Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP