NEW YORK (AP) – Peter Nicks had been documenting students at Oakland High School, California, for months when the pandemic struck.
“It’s in the bay,” says a virus student as he and others mill together in a classroom and think excitedly about the cancellation of school.
Soon, the director is heard through the loudspeaker – an announcement that would signal not only the end of prom and graduation ceremonies, but possibly Nicks’ movie as well. After recording other Oakland institutions, Nicks planned to document a year in the lives of Oakland’s multicultural teens. ‘Something like’ The Breakfast Club ‘with colored children,’ he says.
But how do you make an intimate, observational documentary about school life when the corridors are suddenly empty, the school musical is canceled and your third act becomes virtual?
“The first assignment was to capture that moment,” said Nicks, speaking through Zoom of Oakland. “Shortly afterwards it was: what are we going to do? How are we going to possibly finish this movie? “
“Living room,” Nicks’ aptly titled – and eventually completed – documentary is one of 74 feature films to debut at the Sundance Film Festival starting Thursday.. The pandemic turned the annual festival in Park City, Utah, into a largely virtual event, but it has also reformed many of the films that will roll out there.
No more festival represents an annual cinematic rebirth – a fresh crop, a new wave – then Sundance. But given the restrictions on gatherings since March last year, how could filmmakers have their films made, 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 countless filmmakers at the festival who have accomplished the seemingly impossible feat of making a movie in 2020.
A handful of high-profile films made during the pandemic recently hit streaming platforms, including the heist comedy ‘Locked Down’ and the romance “Malcolm & Marie.” But Sundance offers the most complete look yet of movie making under the pandemic. Even in an independent film world based on a can-do spirit, the results – including “Homeroom”, “How It Ends” and “In the Same Breath” – are often striking for their ingenuity.
When school closed, Nicks sifted through his images and realized he had a rich thread. Responding to a history of police brutality, the students had pushed for the extermination of agents from the high school campus. Nicks decided to continue production, relying on a mix of the students’ own cell phone images and more selective recording options. “Homeroom” turned into a coming-of-age story, laced with activism and George Floyd protests, reflecting a greater awakening.
“We started to see that we had a powerful story that started in the beginning, but we just didn’t know it,” says Nicks. “That’s part of why I love documentaries – how and why things are revealed. You just have to be open to making those adjustments and seeing it. ”
Married writer-directors Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein also tried to adapt to the pandemic that is normal in Los Angeles.
“That adaptation evoked so many intense emotions,” said Lister-Jones, the actress-filmmaker 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 about what our future as filmmakers would look like.”
Based on their own fears and therapy sessions, they began to sketch a film about a woman (Lister-Jones) walking her newly visible younger self (Cailee Spaeny) through an abandoned Los Angeles 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 evoked.
“It was kind of experimental in nature because the world was in an experimental place,” says Lister-Jones.
They called up starring friends – Olivia Wilde, Fred Armisen, Helen Hunt, Nick Kroll – for cameos and mostly shot scenes on patios, backyards, and doorsteps.
“Some people weren’t ready,” Wein says. “Some people were super eager, like, ‘Yeah, I’m dying to do something.’ And some people were a little in the middle, a little scared, ‘This is going to be my first thing. I haven’t even left the house. ”
Given the ever-changing emotional rollercoaster of everyday life in the pandemic, making a comedy was often difficult – not only logistically but emotionally.
“It takes a lot of energy to make a film. It really scared me to do that when we were in such a raw emotional state, ”says Lister-Jones. “Many days we started shooting before I said softly or out loud, ‘I can’t.’ By the end of that day, it was so unbelievable to watch it feed me. “
Sundance’s slate is lower than the usual 120 features, but it’s not because of a lack of submissions. More than 3,500 feature films were submitted. Some were made in a pandemic sprint.
In the summer, British filmmaker Ben Wheatley made ‘In the Earth’, a horror film set during the pandemic. Carlson Young shot her fantasy horror thriller “The Blazing World” last August with a skeleton crew in Texas, quarantining the cast at a wedding resort. Most movies made in 2020 are time capsules, but that is explicitly the goal of Kevin Macdonald’s “Life in a Day 2020”. It is composed of 15,000 hours of YouTube footage shot worldwide in one day.
Nanfu Wang, the China-born New Jersey-based documentary maker whose 2019 Sundance award-winning documentary ‘One Child Nation’ analyzed the personal and widespread toll of China’s one-child policy, did not realize she was starting a film when she did. In the beginning, she continued to take screenshots and social media posts she saw coming from China in January.
“I saw the information about the virus, that the outbreak was censored in real time,” said Wang. “I would see something and it would be removed ten minutes later. That forced me to file them. “
Wang was in the middle of several other projects. At first she tried to release what she had collected to news outlets. Then she started planning a short film. Then the scale of the outbreak made a feature film necessary. HBO came on board. And Wang began partnering with 10 cinematographers in China to bridge the yawning gap between party propaganda and reality.
But of course more twists and turns followed. The outbreak spread outside China, and in the US response, Wang saw a different but similar virus response from a different regime. Soon she also organized film crews in America. The scope of “In the same Breath” grew.
“The outbreak in the US shocked me even more than it originally started in China. I felt that America is a more advanced society and things like that shouldn’t happen the same way or worse. It changed the movie, ”says Wang. “In March, April, I started to think, okay, what is the movie about now?”
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Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP