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NEW YORK (AP) – Peter Nicks had been documenting high school students in Oakland, Calif., For months when the pandemic struck.
“It’s in the bay,” said a student of the virus as he and others grinded together in a classroom, excitedly considering canceling school.
Soon the principal is heard over loudspeaker – an announcement that would signal not only the scuttling of prom and graduation ceremonies, but, potentially, Nicks’ movie. After chronicling other Oakland institutions, Nicks set out to document a Year in the Life of Oakland’s multicultural teens. “Something like ‘The Breakfast Club’ with colored kids,” he says.
But how do you make an intimate observational documentary on school life when the halls suddenly empty, the school musical canceled, and your third act goes virtual?
“The first order of business was just to capture this moment,” Nicks says, speaking through Zoom of Oakland. “Then shortly after, it was: what are we going to do? How are we going to end this movie? “
“Homeroom”, Nicks’ aptly titled – and ultimately finished – documentary is one of 74 feature films that will debut at the Sundance Film Festival starting Thursday.. The pandemic has turned the annual Park City, Utah festival into a largely virtual event, but he also remodeled many films that will be set there.
No festival represents an annual cinematic renaissance more – a fresh harvest, a new wave – than Sundance. But given the constraints on gatherings since last March, how could filmmakers get their films made, edited and delivered at Sundance?
The majority of films screened this year were shot before COVID-19 arrived – many of them were edited during quarantine. But there are plenty of filmmakers at the festival who have pulled off the seemingly impossible feat of making a movie in 2020.
A handful of high profile films made during the pandemic have recently been released on streaming platforms, including the heist comedy “Locked Down” and the romance “Malcolm & Marie”. But Sundance will provide the most comprehensive look to filmmaking under the pandemic yet. Even in an independent film world built on a proactive spirit, the results – including “Homeroom,” “How it ends” and “In the same breath” – are often striking for their ingenuity.
With school closed, Nicks sifted through his images and realized he had a rich thread. The students, in response to a story of police brutality, had pushed to eradicate the police from the high school campus. Nicks decided to continue production, relying on a mix of student cell phone footage and more selective filming opportunities. “Homeroom” turned into a coming-of-age tale, torn by George Floyd’s activism and protests, which reflected a wider 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 part of why I love documentaries – how and why things are revealed. You just have to be open to make those adjustments and see it. ”
Writer-directors Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein, who are married, were also trying to adjust to the normal pandemic in Los Angeles.
“This adjustment was so emotional,” says Lister-Jones, 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 would look like as filmmakers.”
Drawing on their own anxieties and therapy sessions, they began sketching a film about a woman (Lister-Jones) strolling through a sorry Los Angeles with her newly visible young self (Cailee Spaeny), on the eve of an impending asteroid apocalypse. The movie isn’t about the pandemic, but it’s clearly a product of the kind of self-reflection it has sparked.
“It was kind of experimental in nature because the world was in an experimental place,” Lister-Jones says.
They called up actor friends – Olivia Wilde, Fred Armisen, Helen Hunt, Nick Kroll – for cameos and shot scenes mostly on patios, backyards and doorsteps.
“Some people weren’t ready,” Wein says. “Some people were very impatient, like, ‘Yeah, I’m dying to do 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 daily life during 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 while we were in such a brutal emotional state really terrified me, ”Lister-Jones says. “Many days we went out to shoot before I said quietly or out loud, I can’t do it.” At the end of that day, it was so amazing how it fed me.
Sundance’s Slate is down from the usual 120 features, but that’s not for lack of submissions. Over 3,500 feature films were sent. Some were made in a pandemic sprint.
British filmmaker Ben Wheatley directed “In the Earth”, a horror film set in the pandemic, over the summer. Carlson Young filmed his fantasy horror thriller “The Blazing World” with a skeleton crew last August in Texas, with the actors quarantined together at a wedding station. Most of the movies made in 2020 are time capsules, but that is explicitly the purpose of Kevin Macdonald’s “Life in a Day 2020”. It is made up of 15,000 hours of YouTube footage shot around the world in a single day.
Nanfu Wang, the New Jersey-based Chinese-born documentary filmmaker whose 2019 Sundance Award-winning documentary “One Child Nation,” analyzed the personal and widespread toll of China’s one-child policy, failed to realize that she was starting a movie when she did. At first, she just continued to take screenshots and record social media posts she had seen coming out of China in January.
“I was seeing the information about the virus, about the censorship of the epidemic in real time,” Wang said. “I saw something and ten minutes later it would be deleted. This forced me to archive them.
Wang was in the middle of several other projects. At first, she tried to convey what she had gathered to the media. Then she started planning a short film. Then, the scale of the epidemic required a feature film. HBO came on board. And Wang started working with 10 cinematographers in China to capture the yawning gap between party propaganda and reality.
But other twists, of course, followed. The outbreak has spread beyond China, and in the US response, Wang saw a different but comparable viral response from another regime. Soon she also organized film crews in America. The scope of “In the Same Breath” has widened.
“The epidemic in the United States has shocked me even more than it originally started in China. I had this idea that America is a more advanced society and that things like this shouldn’t happen the same or worse. It changed the movie, ”Wang says. “In March, April, I started to think: OK, what is the movie about?”
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Follow screenwriter Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP
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