NEW YORK (AP) – Peter Nicks had been documenting students at Oakland High School in California for months when the pandemic began.
“It’s in the bay,” says one student of the virus as he and others crowd into a classroom, enthusiastically contemplating the school’s cancellation.
Soon, the director is heard over the loudspeaker – an announcement that would signal not only the end of the graduation and graduation ceremonies, but potentially the Nicks film. After narrating other Oakland institutions, Nicks decided to document a year in the lives of Oakland’s multicultural teenagers. “Something like ‘The Breakfast Club’ with black kids,” he says.
But how do you make an intimate, observational documentary about school life when the hallways are suddenly empty, the school musical canceled and your third act becomes virtual?
“The first thing to do was capture that moment,” says Nicks, speaking for Zoom from Oakland. “So, shortly after that, it was: What are we going to do? How are we going to finish this movie? “
“Homeroom,” The appropriately titled – and finally completed – documentary by Nicks is one of 74 feature films to debut at the Sundance Film Festival starting Thursday. The pandemic has turned the annual Park City, Utah festival into a virtual event, but also remodeled many of the films that will be rolled out there.
No festival represents yet another annual film renaissance – a new crop, a new wave – than Sundance. But given the restrictions on meetings since last March, how could filmmakers make their films, edited and delivered to Sundance?
Most of the films shown this year were shot before the arrival of COVID-19 – many of them edited during quarantine. But there are several filmmakers at the festival who achieved the seemingly impossible feat of making a film in 2020.
Several high-profile films made during the pandemic have recently made their way onto streaming platforms, including the assault comedy “Locked Down” and the novel “Malcolm & Marie”. But Sundance will provide the most complete look at pandemic filmmaking. Even in an independent film world based on an entrepreneurial spirit, the results – including “Homeroom”, “How It Ends” and “In the Same Breath” – are often impressive for their resourcefulness.
With the school closed, Nicks combed through his footage and realized he had a rich topic. The students, responding to a story of police brutality, were pushing to eradicate police officers from the college campus. Nicks decided to continue production, counting on a mixture of the students’ cell phone footage and more selective filming opportunities. “Homeroom” turned into a maturing tale, divided with George Floyd’s activism and protests, which reflected a great awakening.
“We started to recognize that we had a powerful narrative that started at the beginning, we just didn’t realize it,” says Nicks. “That’s why I love documentaries – how and why things are revealed. You just need to be open to make these adjustments and see this. ”
Screenwriters and directors Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein, who are married, were also trying to adapt to the normal pandemic in Los Angeles.
“This adjustment was bringing a lot of intense emotions,” says Lister-Jones, the actress and filmmaker for “The Craft: Legacy” and “Band Aid”. “A lot of fear, vulnerability and a lot of uncertainty not only about the world, but also about what our future as filmmakers would be like.”
From their own anxieties and therapy sessions, they began to sketch a film about a woman (Lister-Jones) walking through a deserted Los Angeles with her 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 has generated.
“It was a kind of experimental nature because the world was an experimental place,” says Lister-Jones.
They summoned actor friends – Olivia Wilde, Fred Armisen, Helen Hunt, Nick Kroll – for cameos and filmed scenes mainly in courtyards, backyards and doors.
“Some people were not ready,” says Wein. “Some people were super anxious, like, ‘Yes, I’m dying to do something.’ And some people were kind of 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 just logistically, but emotionally.
“It takes a lot of energy to produce a film. Doing this when we were in such a raw emotional state really terrified me, ”says Lister-Jones. “Many days, when we went out to film, I would say in a low voice or out loud: ‘I can’t do it’. At the end of that day, it was amazing to see how it fed me. “
Sundance’s list is below the usual 120 features, but it’s not for lack of subscriptions. More than 3,500 feature films have been submitted. Some were done in a pandemic race.
British filmmaker Ben Wheatley made “In the Earth”, a horror film set in a pandemic during the summer. Carlson Young filmed his horror and fantasy thriller “The Blazing World” with a skeletal crew last August in Texas, with the cast quarantined at a wedding resort. Most films made in 2020 are time capsules, but that is explicitly the purpose of Kevin Macdonald’s “Life in a Day 2020”. It consists of 15,000 hours of YouTube footage shot worldwide in a single day.
Nanfu Wang, a Chinese-born documentary filmmaker and resident of New Jersey, whose 2019 Sundance-winning documentary “One Child Nation” analyzed the personal and widespread tribute to China’s one-child policy, didn’t realize he was starting a movie when he did . At first, she just took pictures of the screen and recorded social media posts she saw leaving China in January.
“I was seeing information about the virus, about the outbreak being censored in real time,” says Wang. “I saw something and, ten minutes later, I would be excluded. This forced me to file them. “
Wang was in the middle of several other projects. At first, she tried to pass on what she had gathered to the media. Then she started planning a short film. So, reaching the outbreak required a feature film. HBO came on board. And Wang started working with 10 filmmakers in China to capture the huge gap between the party’s propaganda and reality.
But more twists, of course, followed. The outbreak spread beyond China and, in the US response, Wang saw a different, but comparable, viral response from another regime. Soon, she was organizing film crews in America as well. The scope of “In the Same Breath” has grown.
“The outbreak in the United States shocked me even more than it originally started in China. I had this notion that America is a more advanced society and things like that shouldn’t be happening the same way or worse. It changed the film, ”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