NEW YORK (AP) – Peter Nicks had been documenting students at Oakland High School in California for months when the pandemic hit.
“It’s in the bay,” says one virus student as he and others die together in a classroom, looking forward to the school’s cancellation.
Soon, the director will be heard through the speaker, an announcement that would indicate not only the holding of graduation and graduation ceremonies, but potentially the Nicks movie. After chronicling other Oakland institutions, Nicks had set out to document a year in the life of Oakland’s multicultural teens. “Something like‘ The Breakfast Club ’with colorful kids,” he says.
But how do you make an intimate observational documentary about school life when the hallways suddenly empty, the school musical is canceled, and your third act becomes virtual?
“The first business order only captured that moment,” says Nicks, speaking for Oakland’s Zoom. “Then shortly afterwards it was: What are we going to do? How will we end this film? “
“Homeroom” The appropriately titled and finally completed documentary by Nicks is one of 74 feature films to be released at the Sundance Film Festival starting Thursday. The pandemic has transformed the annual Park City, Utah festival into a largely virtual event, but has also remodeled many of the films that will be developed there.
No festival represents more of an annual cinematic renaissance – A fresh crop, a new wave – that Sundance. But given the limitations of the meetings since last March, how could the filmmakers do, edit, and deliver them to Sundance?
Most of the films screened this year were shot before the arrival of COVID-19, many of them released during the quarantine. But there are numerous filmmakers at the festival who achieved the seemingly impossible feat of making a film in 2020.
A handful of high-profile films made during the pandemic have recently hit streaming platforms, including the stolen comedy “Locked Down.” and the romance “Malcolm and Marie.” But Sundance will provide the most complete aspect of filmmaking under the pandemic. Even in an independent cinematic world based on a spirit of doing things, the results, including “Homeroom,” “How It Ends,” and “In the Same Breath,” are often striking for their ingenuity.
With the school closed, Nicks scanned his pictures and realized he had a rich thread. The students, in response to a history of police brutality, had been pushing to eradicate officers on the institute’s campus. Nicks decided to continue production, relying on a mix of his own images of students ’cell phones and more selective filming opportunities. “Homeroom” turned into a tale about the age of age, full of activism and protests by George Floyd, that reflected a greater awakening.
“We started to recognize that we had a powerful narrative that started at the beginning, we just didn’t realize it,” Nicks says. “That’s why I love documentaries: how and why things are revealed. You just have to be more discriminating with the help you render toward other people.
Writer-directors Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein, married, were also trying to adapt to the normal Los Angeles pandemic.
“This adjustment sparked so many intense emotions,” says Lister-Jones, the actress-filmmaker of “The Craft: Legacy” and “Band Aid”. “A lot of fear and vulnerability and a lot of uncertainty not just about the world, but what our future as filmmakers would be like.”
From their own anxieties and therapy sessions, they began sketching a film about a woman (Lister-Jones) walking through a desolate Los Angeles with her recently visible young man (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 provoked.
“It was kind of experimental in nature because the world was in an experimental place,” Lister-Jones says.
They summoned actor friends (Olivia Wilde, Fred Armisen, Helen Hunt, Nick Kroll) for cameos and shot scenes mostly in courtyards, gardens and gates.
“Some people weren’t prepared,” Wein says. “Some people were really looking forward to it, like,‘ Yeah, I’m looking forward to doing something. ’And some people were a little in the middle, a little scared,‘ This goes to my first thing. I didn’t even leave the house. “
Given the ever-fluctuating emotional roller coaster of everyday life in the pandemic, making a comedy was often difficult, not only logistically, but emotionally.
“It takes a lot of energy to produce a film. Doing it when we were in such a raw emotional state really terrified me, ”says Lister-Jones. “Many days when we went out to shoot before I would say in a low voice or out loud, ‘I can’t do that.’ At the end of that day, it was so amazing to see the ways I was fed.”
The Sundance board is less than the usual 120 features, but it’s not for lack of submissions. More than 3,500 feature films were sent. Some were made in a pandemic sprint.
British filmmaker Ben Wheatley made “In the Earth”, a horror film set in the pandemic during the summer. Carlson Young shot his fantasy horror thriller “The Blazing World” with a skeletal crew last August in Texas, with the cast in quarantine together at a wedding complex. Most films made in 2020 are time capsules, but this is explicitly Kevin Macdonald’s purpose in “Life in a Day 2020”. It consists of 15,000 hours of YouTube videos recorded worldwide in a single day.
Nanfu Wang, the Chinese-born documentary filmmaker based in New Jersey, the 2019 Sundance Award-winning documentary, “One Child Nation,” analyzed the personal and widespread toll of China’s one-child policy, did not realize it was beginning a movie when he did. At first, I was still taking screenshots and recording posts on social media that I saw coming out of China in January.
“I saw the information about the virus, about the fact that the outbreak was censored in real time,” Wang says. “I would see something and then ten minutes later it would be deleted. That forced me to file them. “
Wang was in the middle of several other projects. At first, he tried to deliver what he had picked up to the media. Then he started planning a short film. Then, the scope of the outbreak required a feature film. HBO got on board. And Wang began working with ten filmmakers in China to capture the gap between party propaganda and reality.
But, of course, more twists were made. The outbreak spread beyond China, and in the U.S. response, Wang saw a different but comparable virus response from another regime. Soon, he also organized film teams in America. The scope of “In the Same Breath” grew.
“The outbreak in the United States surprised me even more than it originally began in China. He had this notion that America is a more advanced society and that things like that should not happen the same way or worse. It changed the film, “Wang says.” 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