Member Lens: Spirit Award Winner Dale Dickey Looks Back & Forges Ahead
With the Film Independent Spirit Awards just announcing our nominees, we thought it was a good time to focus our Member Lens series on a Member who is a past winner as well.
Dale Dickey is a has always loved acting. She started at age 9 in a university sponsored performance of The Sound of Music, then went on to New York, then eventually working on films like Sean Penn’s The Pledge and TV shows like My Name Is Earl.
In 2010, Debra Granik’s Winters Bone was a smash hit and indie darling. It was nominated for seven Spirit Awards and won two, including Best Supporting Female for Dickey’s performance as the dangerous Merab.
Since then, she’s been a staple in both indie films, TV shows and everything in between. In the last few years, she’s shifted from playing supporting roles to leading films, with her first lead performance, in 2022’s A Love Song, nabbing her another Spirt Award nomination.
As a Member, of course, she could vote the winners of the Spirit Awards, and yes, we do find out if she voted for herself.
You can vote for this year’s nominees as well, as long as you become a member by December 18th. (That’s today!)
Let’s start with your background. You started acting when you were really young, I read at nine years old. What drew you to acting at that age?
Well, my mother and my grandparents had always taken me to the theater and to the ballet and to films. I sang, I would sing in the chorus and stuff, and I took dance lessons. The university where I grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee had a tremendous theater program, and they had an outdoor amphitheater where they did summer stock. They were doing ‘Sound of Music’ when I was nine years old and all my friends in the neighborhood were going to audition and I just said, well, why not? They cast me and I just never looked back.
I continued to work with the university about three or four times a year as a kid because my mom didn’t mind. She would drive me to rehearsal, they’d call and say, can Dale come be in the crowd of this big Shakespeare production we’re doing?
I got a lot of really good training and experience as a kid and it was just what I always wanted to do. And I couldn’t do anything else. So, I just ended up going to school there to study officially.
As a kid from a split household, it was a little dysfunctional, a little chaotic, it was really the best thing for me to be in a safe and nurturing environment where I could get attention and learn and be loved and supported. And so, it was a saving grace for me as a kid.
The arts are really awesome for that. And it’s definitely helped me out in my life, too.
Lately, you’ve been taking some more leading roles, like in The G and A Love Song. Tell me about that journey from doing supporting roles to trying to get more leads.
Well, it’s an interesting journey. I figured I would continue the career I’ve had, which I’m very happy with and grateful for, in doing supporting character roles. I’ve done lots of leads in theater on stage. I still do theater.
But when A Love Song came along, it was my first opportunity at a lead role. And I jumped on it. I loved the script.
And then The G just came like a year and a half after that. Hopefully, The G is going to be released next year sometime in the States. We did a lot of festivals, but they were all foreign festivals because it’s a Canadian film. I’m the only American attached. But completely different, completely opposite kinds of roles, but two leads, nonetheless.
I learned I was terrified, particularly with A Love Song, my first, because I didn’t know if I could if I could carry a film, and a film like that is was so quiet and silent, so much unspoken. And it really challenged me. And I was lucky I had a terrific director with Max Walker-Silverman and great crew. And the same with The G, Karl Hearne was the director, a great crew. I just dove in and trusted.
I learned years ago, the director was like, just trust me, trust yourself. I trust you. We’re going to be fine. And that’s really all you can do is show up, be prepared and be ready to work.
After A Love Song, when it finally came out and I had this huge responsibility, ‘Oh, please don’t let me have fucked up Max’s film, please, please, please.’ And once I saw that the reviews were positive and people got the film, it was a little bit of a relief that, OK, it worked. And, you know, it’s not all about me.
But when you’re the lead of the film and carrying it, it is a completely different responsibility that I had never had before, which I’m still learning how to manage that. Hopefully some more leads will come along, but I’m very happy with the wonderful supporting characters that come my way as well.
I just like to work. I know that sounds so lame and trite, but I do. We all want to work.
I loved how A Love Song dealt with subtext. Just like you said, there’s not a lot of dialogue. It’s sparse. It’s softly played, but it really comes across.
What did you do to prepare with director Max Walker-Silverman and then your costar Wes Stuti to create like the inner lives of your character? Tell me about the prep process for a role like that.
When I first read the script, I was a little nervous because the dialogue was so sparse. And of course, once I got there and Max and I started working together, I understood the meaning behind that. This woman is isolated and alone and removed from society for a reason.
It was just a wonderful stroke of luck that he got Wes Stuti involved. Wes was a wonderful partner. And Max had told us at one point that Wes and I had both spent our careers playing such rough, scarred up, you know, downtrodden people, gritty, rough people that he wanted to see a kinder side and it was it was just a beautiful experience.
I was there by myself. It was my first job during Covid. We filmed the fall of 2020. And even though we were outdoors, we still had to be masked. It was a tiny crew.
But Max and I talked a lot on the phone before I got there. And then we went into quite a lot of detail about Faye’s background and where she had been up until now and the relationship with the husband, which was always centered around music, which is such an important part of the film, that she pushed away from her life.
When Wes came in, we made the decision to not discuss too much about our relationship, because the three of us, Max, Wes and I, wanted to keep it real and organic as if we were just picking up from where we left off so many years ago. And that awkwardness of someone you once had a crush on and all of a sudden meeting them at a whole different time of your life.
We’d both been married and we had known each other’s partners in the past, but not closely. So, there was really very little we knew about each other’s lives. And we left it that way. We talked more about what our relationship was in high school, you know, just lightly, and why it was important to reconnect.
I think it worked, not talking about it too much, not planning it out too much, but just sort of letting it fall where it may as we sort of reintroduced ourselves to each other.
And you can see it because the whole dynamic between the two of you was like that. You’re feeling each other out. To have that as actors, it translates.
I want to talk about your relationship with indie film. Walker-Silverman was a first-time director for that film. What drew you to working with him? And what drives you to working with the filmmaker in general?
It’s always the story first, the script and story. With the invention of Zoom, the way I’ve met, I met Max for the first time and just get a good feeling about someone and where your sensibilities lie. Max reminded me so much of the wonderful Debra Granik, who I’ve been honored to work with twice.
I also want to know if I feel our sensibilities are the same and that we can communicate well, because I like a strong director. I come with some insecurities that are quickly nipped in the bud. But I like to know that we speak the same language so that I’m going to be in good hands, and they know that they’re going to be in good hands with me.
Max is very cerebral, very smart. He’s very gentle. He did some acting years ago in college, but that was not his main thing. But he knows how to speak to actors. And I just I loved him. He went to film school in New York, and he brought his whole crew that they all did each other’s films there. And I think that’s lovely. And I want to be a part of young filmmaker stories.
And then just a couple of months ago, I went to Colorado and did another film with director Ramzi Bashour. That time, Max was the producer.
Ramzi was Max’s roommate in college and was a producer on A Love Song, he did the music. He caught my crawfish, the jack of all trades.
Ramzi wrote and directed this beautiful script. He’s Lebanese and it’s a story of a Lebanese mother and son traveling cross country. And there was a small, really lovely role of this hippie, a free-spirited woman that helps them make a turn in their lives. And they asked me to do it. And I knew it was going to be that same great crew. And I’m so thrilled that I got to do it.
And I hope I continue to get to work with that that group of people down the line. I love those ensembles where you they work with the same sort of teams of people. It’s very much family oriented.
That’s fantastic. Yeah. Like a work family.
It’s like you said, everybody knows where each other is coming from. And that trust builds creativity.
And it saves time and money, particularly with indie film. That’s important.
I want to talk to you a little bit about the Film Independent Spirit Awards.
We’ve got them coming up again on February 22nd, and we’re all really excited about it here. You are a winner for your great work in Winter’s Bone. And just tell me a little about your experience with that.
Well, Winter’s Bone was the real turning point for me.
When I went to the audition, Kerry Barden and Paul Schnee, they were casting directors that had been on my radar, and I’d never been able to get into their office, so I was excited when I got cast in the film.I think not only was it just tremendous experience with Deborah and Jennifer and John, everybody.
And then particularly with the Spirit Awards, they embraced Winter’s Bone, which was so lovely. We knew we had a lot of love in the room.
I didn’t expect to win. It was the first award of the night. I’m very nervous at those. It was my first event like that, you know. So, it was a big deal for me.
It really opened doors for me as an actress in terms of exposure with casting directors and directors, because the film was widely seen. And even though I’d been around for a long time, nobody really knew of me, which is fine.
I could see the wheels turning in terms of, it leading to more work, particularly with some really strong scripts for indie films and some strong television series, which some of the writing there is quite good as well. And it was all very exciting and wonderful.
And also, with Film Independent, I was sort of on the outskirts of the film world. I lived in New York for 12 years before I came out here because I studied theater, and I’ve always loved art house films. But Film Independent being a part of the Spirit Awards really introduced me to the incredible, vast breadth of work out there. There’s just so many wonderful, talented people.
And they asked me the next two years after that, I was asked to come and be a juror for Film Independent, which I just loved. You’re in a room with people from every discipline and it’s like a family and collaboration. And I learned so much about how you do cinematography, how you view this discipline and that. And it was a fascinating learning experience.
I just love indie film, and I don’t think I would have found that world had Winter’s Bone not come around and had I not had that opportunity to be introduced into it that way. And now I just can’t get enough of it.
Was the nomination how you first became aware of Film Independent or were you a Member beforehand?
I knew of Film Independent, but I didn’t really know how to be a part of it or what to do. And then Winter’s Bone just sort of thrust me in there. And then I never looked back because it’s such a wonderful organization.
What has been the thing that that you’ve enjoyed the most being part of the organization?
Probably the screeners, the abundance of films that you get to watch and enjoy.
With A Love Song, I was nominated that year for Spirit Award. It was the first year I think they combined male and female, so it was the top 10 performances.
I remember going to that, that ceremony, it’s like Cate Blanchett and Michelle Yeoh and Paul Mescal and all these people. And it was a real kick and an honor to be in that list.
When I voted for Film Independent when I was nominated, somebody asked, ‘You didn’t vote for yourself, did you?’ And I said, ‘No, I wasn’t the best performance. I’m not voting for myself!’
And I voted for Mia Goth in Pearl, who didn’t win, but I was so blown away by her performance. So many tremendous performances, but her bravery and commitment won me over.
But I think screeners and watching other people’s work and realizing that again, the breadth of talent out there and the diversity. I love that.
Thank you so much for taking the time, and it was really great to chat with you!
Remember to tune in to the 40th Film Independent Spirit Awards on Saturday, February 22, 2025, which will be helmed by returning host and Saturday Night Live alum Aidy Bryant. The show, taking place at the beach in Santa Monica, will be streamed live on the IMDb and Film Independent YouTube channels, and across our social platforms.
Want to vote for the winners of the 2025 Spirit Awards? Easy: just Become a Member today and you’ll be able to watch screeners of the nominees and vote for the winners, plus you’ll get year-round access to a plethora of virtual and in-person screenings, special events, education, workshops and more.
Film Independent promotes unique independent voices by helping filmmakers create and advance new work. To support us with a donation, click here.
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Meet the 31 New Project Involve Fellows Joining Our 2025 Cohort
As we celebrate our 40th year, we continue to support filmmakers in our Artist Development Programs. Project Involve, the OG Artist Development program is in its 32nd year where it’s fostered the careers of over 1000 filmmakers. And this year PI has 31 new Fellows joining as part of its 2025 cohort.
They’ll join the likes of Andrew Ahn (Bridgerton), Thembi Banks (Young. Wild. Free.), Effie T. Brown (The Inspection), Linda Yvette Chávez (Flamin’ Hot), Jon M. Chu (Wicked), Jomo Fray (Nickel Boys), Rachel Goldberg (Agatha All Along), Hank Jones (Will Trent), Mako Kamitsuna (All Day and a Night), Marvin Lemus (Gentefied), LaToya Morgan (Splinter), Lulu Wang (Expats), Harry Yoon (The Fire Inside), Kim Yutani (Director of Programming, Sundance) and many more.
With Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group as the Lead Sponsor, Film Independent continues to advance its mission to support diversity and inclusion in the film industry. “2025 marks my 20th year with Project Involve, and it’s as exciting as ever. Each cohort brings fresh energy, passion and creativity that inspire us all” said Francisco Velasquez, Associate Director of Project Involve. “It’s truly a joy to work with such talented and driven artists and to witness the innovative ways they’ll invigorate this industry.”
Project Involve is a free ten-month program for filmmakers from diverse backgrounds. Fellows engage in one-on-one meetings with film industry mentors, attend workshops and conversations led by renowned professionals, join industry networking events and collaboratively produce five short films from inception to completion.
This year’s Fellows will be introduced at Film Independent’s annual First Look Screening on Thursday, January 9, 2025, at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles, where six shorts, including a LAIKA-sponsored stop-motion animation short, produced by the 2024 Project Involve cohort will screen. The event is open to the public.
In addition to all that exciting news, we’d like to announce some generous Grants for our Project Involve Fellows.
First up, we have the Climate Entertainment Commissioning Grant, in partnership with Plot Shift Media to award a $25,000 grant to one talented screenwriter to help them create a brand-new, climate-centered fiction feature script. This initiative is all about fostering projects that raise awareness around climate change while offering a solid financial boost to make these important stories come to life.
We’re also thrilled to announce that Bushra Burney is the well-deserved recipient of the MPAC® Hollywood Bureau Fellowship which provides a $10,000 unrestricted cash grant to an American-Muslim filmmaker. This grant offers incredible support to help amplify the voices of filmmakers from diverse backgrounds.
Amazon MGM Studios, the Cayton-Goldrich Family Foundation, Los Angeles Media Fund and Sony Pictures Entertainment will each provide $10,000 unrestricted cash grants to selected filmmakers participating in the program at a later date.
Plus, there’s a Panavision Fellowship that offers a cinematographer in the program a camera package valued at $60,000 for a future project.
And now, on to this year’s Project Involve Fellows…
CINEMATOGRAPHERS
Robert Chuck
Robert Chuck is a Chinese-Filipino cinematographer originally from Honolulu, Hawai’i. His passion for visual media started in graphic design and evolved into a passion for visual storytelling through filmmaking and cinematography. He moved to California to pursue a career in film, earning his MFA in Cinematography at Chapman University in 2018. Currently residing in Los Angeles, Chuck’s goal is to make meaningful connections through filmmaking that broaden his world view, while also exploring his own roots.
Iris Lee
Iris Lee is a Taiwanese-American cinematographer from Fremont, CA who grew up people-watching with her dad’s camcorder. After graduating from UCLA, she was selected as a Cinematography Fellow with the Television Academy, the inaugural AFI Cinematography Intensive for Women (CIW) program, and is an alum of the Academy Gold Rising program. Most recently, she was named a WIF Cinematography Fellow in 2024.
Omer Lotan
Omer Lotan is a cinematographer based in Los Angeles, originally from Tel Aviv. A ‘Minshar School of Art’ graduate, his work spans films, commercials, and music videos. His projects have been recognized at prestigious festivals, including Cannes, Camerimage, and Jerusalem Film Festival. He has shot commercials for global brands such as Wix, Visa, and Doritos. In 2019, he moved to LA to engage with the international film industry. His recent work includes the multinational feature film Jacob The Baker, streaming on Amazon.
Sade Ndya
Sade Ndya is a Caribbean-American cinematographer known for her surreal imagery and dynamic lighting celebrating Black identity. Represented by Gersh, she has freelanced for Disney, NBC, and more. Her film, Soñadora, premiered at Tribeca and is streaming on Amazon Prime. Her video installation, Re-Imagining Black, made its debut at WACO, curated by Tina Knowles. Ndya empowers youth of color with her organizing work at Made In Her Image, a non-profit offering accessible film education.
Erin G. Wesley
Erin G. Wesley is a Visual Artist born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. As a storyteller and multi-hyphenate artist with a concentration in Cinematography, Wesley’s aim is to create visual experiences that inspire freedom, purpose and imagination. She values connectedness and firmly believes that through storytelling, our shared experiences emerge. Her commitments are to provide inclusive, boundless imagery that represents who she is and depicts the world we share. Wesley completed her MFA at AFI.
DIRECTORS
Alexandria Collins
Alexandria Collins is an award-winning director based in Los Angeles, CA. Her film Woman to Woman won Best International Short at the BIFA-Qualifying Manchester Film Festival and Best Short Film at the Tokyo International Film Festival. Collins directed the HULUween short Reborn. Her films have screened at Canneseries and Hellifax amongst others. She graduated from Florida A&M University with a BA in Journalism and won the 1st Place Associated Press Award for her thesis documentary Love Plus.
Jacob Combs
Jacob Combs is a director, writer and producer from Los Angeles. His most recent short film, The Orange at the Seder, played at festivals across the US and internationally. Combs was part of the writers room for the Netflix comedy Blockbuster, and spent a 6-year stint at Pixar in a variety of writing, development and production roles. He wrote on an untitled feature in development and was part of the writers’ room for Pixar’s original series Dream Productions. He also wrote several episodes of the Emmy-nominated Disney+ series Inside Pixar.
Ritvik Dhavale
Ritvik Dhavale is a writer and director. The stories he wants to tell lie between these two worlds: some fully emergedinto diaspora experiences, while others blur the line. Dhavale’s journey into filmmaking began as a thespian in high school theater. He received his B.A. in Screenwriting from UCLA in 2017. He gained industry experience at CAA, Sundance Institute, and Netflix before fully dedicating himself to bringing stories to life. His latest short film Hema won the audience award at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles.
Peiqi Peng
Peiqi Peng is a Chinese director living in LA, with a MFA in Directing from the American Film Institute. A child fantasy writer who later studied Sociology, Peng tells socially conscious female and queer stories through genre-bending forms, combining gore, fantasy, and absurdist elements with naturalistic sensibilities. Her recent short, A Roadside Banquet, went to a dozen Oscar-Qualifying film festivals, screened on KCET/PBS, got nominated at the YDA Awards, and screened at the American Pavilion showcase at Cannes 2024.
Sylvia Ray
Sylvia Ray is an award-winning Chicana/Korean-American director based in Los Angeles. In 2024, she was selected as a Latino Film Institute Inclusion Fellow, where she wrote and directed The Vote. Her feature script The Middle was a quarterfinalist at the HollyShorts Film Festival and selected for the FICMonterrey Pro-Meetings Program. The Middle proof of concept was nominated for Best LatinX Film at the 2024 HollyShorts Film Festival.
EDITORS
Jazmin Jamias
Jazmin Jamias is an editing graduate of the American Film Institute and recipient of the Anne V. Coates Award for Best Student Editing by ACE (American Cinema Editors). Formerly a rehabilitation nurse, she transitioned into editing, working on short films, documentaries, and music videos. She served as an Assistant Editor for Dreams in Nightmares, which premiered at the BlackStar Film Festival. Jazmin contributed to the 2023 Sundance Directing Lab and represented AFI for FILM lab at the Telluride Film Festival.
Avo John Kambourian
Avo John Kambourian is an award-winning editor and filmmaker from Los Angeles. He is a 2025 Film Independent Project Involve Editing Fellow. While earning his MFA from USC School of Cinematic arts his passion for filmmaking grew into a love for editing and helping filmmakers bring their stories to the screen. In 2024, Neither Donkey, Nor Horse, a short film he co-edited, premiered at Telluride Film Festival and was awarded with a Student Academy Award.
Skylar Lin
Skylar Lin is a film editor and a Film Independent Project Involve Fellow. Born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan, she has edited across various genres, including the National Geographic documentary Asia’s Housing Experiments and the animated feature Bongee Bear and the Kingdom of Rhythm (a finalist at the 2019 Palm Springs International Animation Festival). Her recent work, Where the Mountain Women Sing, premiered at the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival.
Amy Rosenberg
Amy Rosenberg is an award-winning editor and 2025 Film Independent Project Involve Fellow, represented by Cut+Run. Known for her technical precision and emotional depth, her work spans commercials, branded content, and narrative projects. She has collaborated with brands like Calvin Klein, NFL, and Meta, and edited The Code for Dove, a campaign promoting diversity and realistic beauty standards, earning an Anthem Award and Cannes Titanium shortlist.
Emiliano Styles
Emiliano Styles is a Los Angeles based multi-media artist, and the co-founder of production company SoulploitationCreative Works. He is a 2025 Film Independent Project Involve Fellow and has extensive experience as editor and assistant editor on several unscripted (Chasing Flavor, The Real Housewives of Dallas, Love & Hip Hop) and scripted television (Rap Sh!t, The Game), film (2024 NAACP Image Award nominated short film Lucille & upcoming indie feature That’s Her), digital (Hyundai’s Best in Class, 2024 BET Awards), and commercial projects.
EXECUTIVES
Folasade Ade-Banjo
Folashade Ade-Banjo is a Nigerian-American with a knack for storytelling that blends sci-fi and psychological drama with philosophical undertones. She’s focused on how technology, innovation, and culture converge to shape filmmaking. Ade-Banjo began her career at Google cultivating best-in-class creative campaigns for diverse audiences. After her tech stint, she served as a Creative Executive at Amazon Studios specializing in creative campaigns for sci-fi series.
Tyrin Bell-Sinkfield
Tyrin Bell-Sinkfield fell in love with the entertainment industry at young age. The NYC native graduated from The Pennsylvania State University and began his career in the mailroom at Creative Artists Agency. He quickly landed a desk in the TV Scripted department before working on the Hulu series, How to Die Alone. Bell-Sinkfield is currently the TV Coordinator at FilmNation Entertainment developing, packaging and producing series for premium cable and streaming platforms. His passion is to bring underrepresented stories to the forefront.
Jaycie Luo
Jaycie Luo is a competitive ice hockey player turned film executive who is passionate about shedding light on stories from historically underrepresented communities. She graduated from USC with a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and got her start working in film finance and sales at various companies. She currently works at MRC, where she oversees film marketing and publicity campaigns as well as ensures smooth studio operations across business functions.
Connie Qin
Connie Qin grew up in a suburb of Houston, TX as the only child of Chinese-immigrant parents. After graduating from NYU with a B.S. in Business and Political Economy and a brief career in strategy consulting, she worked in representation at The Kohner Agency and Industry Entertainment, where she championed emerging writers from underrepresented backgrounds. She currently works in television development at Rabbit Ears, a CBS Studios-based production company.
Ewea Teresa
From television to spoken word, Ewea Teresa is a fan of storytelling in all forms. She began her entertainment career as a PA in Atlanta before moving out to Los Angeles where she is now a 2025 Film Independent Project Involve Fellow. She loves how stories can both help us escape the world around us and connect us more deeply to it, thus she is drawn to innovative world-building, misfit characters, and cross-cultural narratives. She believes the best stories bend genre and is particularly interested in supporting queer, BIPOC filmmakers.
PRODUCERS
Eduardo Ayres Soares
Eduardo Ayres Soares is a Brazilian director and producer with extensive experience in production and post-production. A 2025 Film Independent Project Involve Fellow, Ayres is passionate about queer narratives and has produced diverse projects, including Chuck and Fern, a live-action fantasy short, and Romeo and Juliet, an experimental hybrid film in Brazilian Sign Language. He was the Head of Post-Production at Anastasia Beverly Hills Studios, overseeing major campaigns, and served as TV Director of Slamdance TV.
Andrés Correa
Andrés Correa is a Mexican-American award-winning producer, educator, and 2025 Film Independent Project Involve Fellow, based in Los Angeles. A USC MFA graduate, Correa is dedicated to amplifying Latinx representation and examining complex social realities through his work. He produced The Dope Years: The Story of Latasha Harlins and For Rosa, earning a Student Academy Award and DGA Student Awards.
Masora Fukuda
Masora Fukuda is an award-winning producer based in Los Angeles. She produced Shania Twain’s music video Giddy Up!, earning her the 2024 Telly Award for Best Music Video. Her portfolio includes Happyend (2024 La Biennale di Venezia) and Sixteen (AFI DWW+), along with producing music videos, commercials, and podcasts featuring talents such as Quincy Jones, Shohei Ohtani, and Pharrell Williams. Her short film credits include Mirai To Future (2023 Pramana Asian Film Festival) and How To Make Shepherd’s Pie (2022 LA Shorts).
Casey Naranjo
Casey Naranjo is an Irish-Ecuadorian filmmaker in Los Angeles. Her producing career unofficially began as a curious 8-year-old with a video camera in her home state of New Jersey. She earned her BFA in Television Writing and Production from Chapman University. Naranjo has collaborated with A24, FX, MAX, The Montecito Picture Company, and Partizan. She currently works as Production Manager for digital media companies Jubilee Media and Nectar, creating short-form content with over 3 billion views.
Aishwarya Sonar
Aishwarya Sonar is a producer from India working at the intersection of US projects focused on humanity, identity and joy. Sonar worked with Priyanka Chopra’s Purple Pebble Pictures on features before moving to LA. She has produced over 20 films which have played at Palm Springs, Red Sea, Santa Barbara, IFFLA among others. Sonar was selected as part of Film London’s Production Finance Market, Film Bazaar’s Co-Production Market and Blackmagic collective’s Producer Lab.
PROGRAMMER
Zegan Doyle
Zegan Doyle is a writer, director, and film programmer. Although quiet by nature, they possess a deep and abiding passion for drama. Doyle is a SXSW Documentary Feature Programming Associate (2025). They have contributed to programming at Outfest LA, Baby Teeth Film Festival, Fine Arts Film Festival in Bridport, as well as the Rubin Museum of Art. They are a Storytelling Institute Fellow with Canal+, the City of Cannes, and the Cannes Film Festival. Doyle earned their MFA in Screenwriting from the University of California, Los Angeles.
WRITERS
Jax Ball
Originally from Arkansas, Jax Ball is now a Los Angeles-based writer. They are a Film Independent Project Involve 2025 Fellow and their script about a dead clown was a finalist in the 2023 ScreenCraft Sci-Fi & Fantasy Screenwriting Competition. They have worked on several shows such as Glow (Netflix) and Little Demon (FX) and got their start writing for TV on Krapopolis (Fox). Currently, they’re digging into their obsessive love of sci-fi and comedy by writing for Rick and Morty (Adult Swim).
Bushra Burney
Bushra Burney is a Pakistani-American writer, performer, and project manager who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and is now based in Los Angeles. Her plays with stories fueled by underrepresented character dynamics have been chosen for new works festivals and her drama feature Jameela at the Bat was a finalist in the 1497 Features Lab and has placed in other competitions. She also wrote and performed a one-person show and is working on a new one. She is always on the quest for a great cup of coffee.
Laura Hunter Drago
Growing up in small-town Virginia, Laura Hunter Drago was a shy child who found her voice through storytelling. An alumna of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Drago writes fantasies and thrillers that center women. She won the Austin Film Festival Fiction Podcast Award for her series, The Crime at Camp Ashwood, and the WeScreenplay Short Script Lab for her script, Nuclearette. Drago also produced stage-to-screen feature film To the New Girl,and Coven Film Festival runner-up short The Echo.
Brandyn Johnson
Brandyn Johnson is a father, filmmaker, and educator from Brooklyn, NY. During his time at USC, he developed a proficiency in screenwriting, directing, creative producing, and film sound through mentorship from award-winning professionals like Brenda Goodman, David Balkan, Barnet Kellman, Steve Flick and Midge Costin. Johnson currently serves as the Program Manager for Ghetto Film School LA.
Montserrat Luna-Ballantyne
Originally from Monterrey, México, Montserrat Luna-Ballantyne is a Los Angeles-based WGA screenwriter. She grew up on a steady diet of folklore, ghost tales, and family chisme that resulted in her love for writing stories about supernatural horror, the horrors of navigating complex family dynamics, and the comedy that exists within it all. Her writing credits include the GLAAD Media-nominated With Love (Amazon).
Welcome all!
In addition to Lead Sponsor Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, Film Independent’s Project Involve Principal Sponsors include the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Formosa Group, the Golden Globe Foundation, LAIKA, Los Angeles Media Fund, Panavision, Pearl Milling Company, Picture Shop and The MPAC ® Hollywood Bureau. Supporting Sponsors are Amazon MGM Studios, the Cayton-Goldrich Family Foundation, Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture, Plot Shift Media, SAGindie and Sony Pictures Entertainment. Additional support provided by Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and The Office of Supervisor Holly J. Mitchell of the Second District of the County of Los Angeles.
Film Independent promotes unique independent voices by helping filmmakers create and advance new work. To become a Member of Film Independent, just click here. To support us with a donation, click here.
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Film Independent Fellows Vie for Oscar Noms
It’s that special time of year again. So much anticipation… so many parties… so much to consume and consider. If these phrases conjure up the holidays and all the stress that comes with them, think again.
It’s awards season— the period from late fall to early spring when movies and the people who make them get recognized for their efforts. Whether you’re a film goer, lover, maker, or all of the above, awards season is an opportunity to witness the exceptional craft of storytellers worldwide.
With the 97th Oscars just around the corner, we’re excited to highlight official submissions for Best International Feature, as well as a Best Live Action Short eligible film, made by Fellows and Participants from Film Independent’s programs. These stories underscore the universal value of human connection, while showcasing the importance of cultures and perspectives from around the world. Film Independent’s Global Media Makers, which connects international storytellers with U.S. entertainment professionals, and Project Involve, which supports filmmakers from underrepresented communities, served as a launchpad for these acclaimed filmmakers, and continue to fuel the careers of burgeoning talent from around the globe.
ARZÉ
Country: Lebanon
Dir: Mira Shaib (Global Media Makers)
Producer: Zeina Badran (Global Media Makers)
Developed through Film Independent’s Global Media Makers 2018 LA Residency, Arzé is a comedic drama following a single mother and her teenage son across Beirut as they try to locate the stolen scooter they rely on to make a living selling her homemade pizza. According to director Mira Shaib, it’s a story about the resilience of Lebanon itself, even in the face of ongoing hardship.
The characters’ quest also parallels the arduous journey the film underwent to get made. Delayed due to protests and the pandemic, then shot during the worst financial crisis in Lebanon’s history, only to have its world premiere initially cancelled by a war, Arzé’s production overcame many obstacles, a testament to its storytellers’ perseverance. Thanks to the support of Global Media Makers, director Shaib and producer Zeina Badran were able to hold workshops for local high school students and organize outdoor film screenings in Lebanon.
Arzé had its North American premiere at Tribeca, and won best Screenplay and Best Actress at the Horizons of Arab Cinema. It is Lebanon’s official selection for the 97th Academy Awards.
SHAMBHALA
Country: Nepal
Dir: Min Bahadur Bham (Global Media Makers)
Shambhala, the Nepali selection for Best International Feature at the 97th Academy Awards, had its world premiere at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival, where it was the first of it’s country to compete for the prestigious Golden Bear award.
Set and shot in the Upper Dolpo region of the Himalayas, home to one of the highest human settlements, it’s no wonder Shambhala has been called visually poetic. The story a pregnant Tibetan refugee searching for her missing husband when her fidelity is called into question, however, is as much a spiritual journey as it is a cinematic one.
In addition to the support he received through Film Independent’s Global Media Makers 2019 LA Residency, director Min Bahadur Bham was granted funds to help make the film at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival. This is his second film selected to be Nepal’s official entry to the Academy Awards— the first was his 2015 film The Black Hen, which won the National Film Award for Best Writer.
LA SUPREMA
Country: Colombia
Dir: Felipe Holguín Caro (Project Involve)
EP: Maria Teresa Gaviría (Project Involve)
La Suprema, Colombia’s official entry to the 97th Academy Awards, centers on Laureana, a teenager who finds empowerment through boxing. She is determined to follow in her estranged uncle’s footsteps as he fights his way to a world title. Living in a remote Colombian village without electricity, Laureana convinces the rest of her town to find a way to watch him compete in a world championship boxing match.
La Suprema, which blends humor and social commentary in this tale of a marginalized community coming together, had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023. The director, Felipe Holguín Caro, and executive producer Maria Teresa Gaviría, both participated in Film Independent’s Project Involve. Previously, Holguín Caro directed two documentary features, as well as multiple music videos and short films. La Suprema is his debut narrative feature.
MAI MARTABA
Country: Nigeria
Dir: Prince Daniel Aboki (Global Media Makers)
Mai Martaba tells the story of Jallaba, an ancient Nigerian kingdom experiencing a trade boom, only to see it fall apart from internal strife among its powerful clans. Challenging conventions of power and legacy, a royal battle unfolds when Jallaba’s leader announces his plans to hand over the kingdom to his daughter, invoking the wrath of the prince who was previously promised the throne.
Director and producer Prince Daniel Aboki was a participant in Film Independent’s Global Media Makers 2023 Directing / Cinematography Workshop that took place in Lagos, Nigeria for the Africa International Film Festival(AFRIFF).
In an effort to scale up the Nigerian film industry in the North, Mai Martaba is the region’s most expensive film ever shot. The director wanted his film to compete not just with other Nigerian productions, but on an international scale, and his efforts were rewarded when the country named Mai Martaba their contender for the 97th Academy Awards. In addition to being an award-winning filmmaker, Prince Daniel is also a UN Peace Ambassador, showcasing his passion for human stories that promote social change.
PLAY HARD
Dir: Winter Dunn (Project Involve)
Category: Best Narrative Short
Play Hard, an official selection at Tribeca, is a short film about an ambitious drummer who meets his match in a modern dancer, who teaches him the value of playing as hard as he works. Director Winter Dunn is an NAACP Image Award Winner and a Film Independent Project Involve Fellow. Her other short films have premiered at SXSW and been featured in The New Yorker. Play Hard is officially eligible for Best Narrative Short at the 97th Academy Awards.
For over 40 years, Film Independent has helped filmmakers get their projects made and seen. The nonprofit organization’s core mission is to champion creative independence in visual storytelling and support a community of artists who embody diversity, innovation and uniqueness of vision.
Film Independent Members watch nominees and vote for the winners of the Spirit Awards. To become a Member of Film Independent and make your vote count for next year’s 40th Annual Spirit Awards, just click here. To support our mission with a donation, click here.
Keep up with Film Independent…
Take it From Them: Our Fellows Tell You Why to Apply to the 2025 Doc Story Lab
Ah, editing: the one phase of production that is truly unique to motion pictures (at least according to some people). Documentary editing is an even more unique form of alchemy. After years of researching, gathering material, shooting, building relationships with participants, and generally filling up hard drives with terabytes of footage, you have to remove yourself from that experience, and look at your film like someone who hasn’t even heard the subject of your film. There are thousands of ways to tell that story, and it can be easy to get lost in the weeds. Once it’s all done, then there’s getting it in front of the right people, whether that’s sales agents, distributors, or organizations that you could partner with.
The Film Independent Documentary Story Lab is there for those intrepid directors who have projects in late production/early post-production. In the Lab, filmmakers attend workshops with established names in the documentary world, everyone from directors to producers, to institutional funders and distributors. Fellows will also be paired with a Creative and Editing Advisor as they work towards a final pitch event with industry executives.
Applications for the 2025 Documentary Story Lab are now open, with a non-Member deadline of December 16 (Film Independent Members have until January 6). But don’t take our word for it. We asked what some of last year’s Documentary Story Lab Fellows what they took out of the labs, and here’s what they had to say:
Why did you apply for Documentary Story Lab?
Lilyana Torres García (Project: I Want to Kill My Grandfather): One of the main reasons I applied for the Lab is because it’s very important to have a community that reminds us why we do documentary filmmaking. It just makes it easier and it gives you more power and more love to keep doing it, because it takes a long time to do a film.
Cody Stickels (Project: A Texas Son): I applied to the Lab because I had this project that was really important to me. And it’s been such a long process, ten years in the making, and I just got in the weeds about it. I didn’t know what to do next. The Film Independent Documentary Story Lab was a place that I could bring it, and have a fresh perspective from people who really care about documentary.
Chelsi Bullard (Project: Unfiltered): I applied to the Film Independent Documentary Story Lab because I’m at a critical time. I’ve been protecting my baby for five years now, and it’s time for new eyes to look at it for me to get feedback. And even if it’s critical, I know it’s coming from a place of love.
Adelina Borets (Project: Flowers of Ukraine)
I’m from Ukraine, and for me, it was a big step, getting knowledge about the American film industry. It was like a big rain of knowledge: How does everything work here? It was also important to understand that my work, a comedy film, be understood and be humorous here.
How would you describe what a documentary filmmaker does someone who wasn’t a filmmaker?
Lilyana Torres García: We have to understand first that, documentary is not a genre, but it’s a form of expression and understanding.
Kenny Rigsby (Project: Pine Curtain Fighters): A documentary filmmaker is someone who empathetically captures a real life, in its specificity, in order to speak a greater or more broad truth.
Suzannah Herbert (Project: Natchez): Documentaries take years and years to make, and there’s so many different layers to making a documentary. There’s research, there’s development, there’s meeting people, there’s production, then there’s the edit and the fundraising. Then there’s the distribution. That that’s one thing I actually love about the process, just how varied it is. Every day is different in documentary filmmaking.
What is something that people don’t realize that a documentary filmmaker does?
Kenny Rigsby (Project: Pine Curtain Fighters): They go to great lengths to build trust with those that they film with. I think that’s really where the magic happens– in that trust.
Cody Stickels: Something people may not realize a documentarian does is push culture forward.
Suzannah Herbert (Project: Natchez): I think one of the things that I love about documentary filmmaking is bringing stories to the world that otherwise wouldn’t be told and giving a voice to the voiceless.
Lilyana Torres García: I think people don’t know that documentary filmmakers, we do a lot of spreadsheets.
What’s one thing you learned from another Fellow during the Lab?
Adelina Borets: My colleagues from the lab opened their worlds. And I also shared mine as a Ukrainian and it is unbelievable how we could exchange them and remind each other that we are different people from different nationalities, but we have something in common.
It’s unbelievable how I could dive into a Mexican story, or an American story. And they could also understand my story.
Cody Stickels: I’ve learned so many things from the other fellows in the lab. And I think overall, just seeing how different we all are and how many stories are being told, is reinvigorating in documentary.
Chelsi Bullard: One thing I learned from the Fellows in the Lab is just to know your story through and through. I think that sometimes it’s intimidating pitching to new people and having outsiders hear your story for the first time. And maybe I felt like I’ve had to construct the narrative in a way that’s more accessible to them. But if I can just be myself, and let my individualism shine, then that’s more than enough.
What was the best part of the lab?
Suzannah Herbert: A week in the Fi Documentary Story Lab was creatively inspiring and encouraging in every way. In between learning from seasoned filmmakers, workshopping our films, and pitching to industry executives, the best part was forming lasting, supportive friendships with the other fellows.
Chelsi Bullard: Having dedicated time away from the edit bay to simply be present was fabulous. It’s always reassuring to learn our feelings are not in a vacuum, and that there are other artists out there who now we can lean on as well all push through and deliver our films out into the world. I left the week-long intensive feeling a renewed sense of confidence and brimming with ideas on how to shape the film into its final form.
Kenny Rigsby: The best part of the Documentary Story Lab was the in-between conversations with the other fellows are where I felt like I learned the most. Being able to ask so many off-the-cuff, informal questions to filmmakers who are a few steps ahead and in the trenches was very valuable. Also, the Film Independent staff’s support and kindness, and taco & margarita nights! The Fi Documentary Story Lab provided exactly what I needed at this stage in my filmmaking journey — objective feedback on my film, access to filmmaking networks, creative sessions with top-notch professionals, and a wonderfully supportive group of peers!
Why should a documentary filmmaker apply to this program?
Lilyana Torres García: One of the most important things is to create community, because that feeds the power of what we do.
Suzannah Herbert: I applied to the Documentary Story Lab to foster relationships with other filmmakers. I think that during the pandemic, especially, I felt very isolated from the doc community. We’re all siloed in our own little bubbles making our films, whether it’s in the field or in front of a computer. This was such an incredible opportunity to meet with, other creatives and also people in the industry. I received so much amazing creative feedback and support, and it was just very nurturing.
Chelsi Bullard: A filmmaker should apply to the program because we can’t do this alone. We have so many speakers that come in that take us out of just sitting in our office chair, where we can learn from producers in the field, where we can learn from legal counsel in the field. There’s just so many parts of filmmaking. It’s not just the creative side. It’s a great marriage of creative and business that is going to be lasting in our careers.
Kenny Rigsby: You’re just in the trenches for so many years. To be able to come somewhere and spend time with other people who understand it and do the same thing is just invaluable.
Header image by Alana Waksman
For over 40 years, Film Independent has helped filmmakers get their projects made and seen. The nonprofit organization’s core mission is to champion creative independence in visual storytelling and support a community of artists who embody diversity, innovation and uniqueness of vision.
Film Independent Members watch nominees and vote for the winners of the Spirit Awards. To become a Member of Film Independent and make your vote count for next year’s 40th Annual Spirit Awards, just click here. To support our mission with a donation, click here.
Keep up with Film Independent…
Local Is the New Universal: Saba’s Journey Through Shared Struggles
After its world premiere and three sold-out screenings at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, Saba, a film by Maksud Hossain, has embarked on a prestigious global festival circuit, screening at the Busan International Film Festival and now in competition at the Red Sea International Film Festival. I recently reconnected with Maksud, my Global Media Makers Fellow, for an in-depth conversation about the creation of his film, reflecting on our shared experience in Los Angeles back in June 2023.
Film Independent’s Global Media Makers (GMM) is a six-week residency in LA, in partnership with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, supporting independent filmmakers worldwide. This is where I, a Lebanese screenwriter and director, met Maksud Hossain from Bangladesh while we were both in the screenwriting track. It was here that I first read the screenplay for Saba and later watched an early draft of his debut film.
It’s a story about Saba (Mehazabien Chowdhury), a 24-year-old woman who is the sole caregiver to her ailing mother, Shirin (Rokeya Prachy). To afford her mother’s surgery, Saba must make sacrifices, from working at a shisha lounge to asking her uncle for financial support, all, while racing against time and grappling between her attraction to Ankur (Mostafa Monwar) and her need for survival.
“We’re just breathing to barely survive here.” This line, delivered by Ankur to Saba, struck me profoundly during my last viewing of the film. Although I had seen Saba in its various forms, from script to final cut, the emotional weight of that line of dialogue resonated deeply when conflict broke out in my home country, Lebanon. Set in the bustling streets of Dhaka, flavored with the taste of Kachchi, and deeply rooted in local culture, this film resonates universally. “The more specific you are, the more universal it becomes,” reads a quote Hossain kept on his desk while working on the film.
“It’s a story of stairs,” as Maksud describes it. Saba is bookended with stairs; the film begins with her descending stairs, laundry in hand, to assist her mother, and ends with her ascending them to confront Ankur. Saba is stuck in that liminal space between two floors, a transitional space. The staircase becomes a visual metaphor for Saba’s journey, embodying her inner conflict and character arc. “It’s also a story about letting go,” Maksud added.
Flashback to June in Los Angeles: We were promised California sunshine but instead were greeted by gray skies. However, the warmth of our GMM sessions filled the room. Maksud’s feedback session came after a long day, and despite the jet lag, all the feedback and notes were coming at him at a hundred miles per hour. After much back and forth, the mentor asked him, “What is your film about?” He was under the spotlight, and it was in that vulnerable moment he uttered those words: “It’s about letting go.” He had never, in all his preparation, thought of that. “Sometimes when a mentor pushes you, a gut instinct comes out, something you’ve never thought about surfaces from your subconscious,” he explained. This revelation became his guiding force through production and working with actors. “I wanted to give the audience an emotional experience of how difficult it is to let go of a loved one, even though it could be the best thing for them,” he reflected.
Maksud’s wife and co-writer, Trilora Khan, served as his primary inspiration. Saba is inspired by Khan’s relationship with her disabled mother, a personal story that became deeply intertwined with real life. During production, Maksud’s mother-in-law’s health deteriorated, and she passed away just five hours after filming wrapped—a haunting parallel between life and art. As Francis Ford Coppola once said, “I always became the character of the movie I was working on… Is this my life? Or is this basically all the movies I’m making?”
Hossain’s directing style and approach were shaped by a documentary-inspired method to tell this fictional story. Confident in directing actors after studying with Judith Weston for two years, he relied heavily on improvisation exercises to bring authenticity to his actors’ performances. Many improvised scenes found their way into the final cut, further grounding the film in reality.
Global Media Makers marked the final stop for Saba before production, following nearly two years in film development labs. For us, GMM was more than just a residency; it was a global community of filmmakers. Maksud met invaluable collaborators, including his film composer, Amman Abbasi, through GMM, which proved instrumental for Saba.
Looking ahead, Maksud has already begun working on his next film, The Dorm, inspired by his experience as a freshman in Indiana at Purdue University during 9/11, further exploring deeply personal stories through a unique lens. His new film will feature a Hollywood actor, marking another milestone in his career.
Filmmaking is a demanding journey. It took Maksud 18 years to make his first feature after his short documentary “Three Beauties”, which won a Student Academy Award in 2006. Yet, it’s all worth it because we’re surrounded by a community of artists who remind us that eventually, we’ll get there. We’ll finish that screenplay and shoot that film, even if some days it feels like a far-fetched dream. Global Media Makers is a bridge that enables filmmakers worldwide to grow, connect, and share their stories, reinforcing that our dreams, even when distant, are attainable.
Global Media Makers (GMM) is an in-depth, intensive artist development exchange program that produces residencies for international mid-career writers, directors, and producers in film and television. GMM fosters networks between U.S. industry leaders and mid-career film and TV professionals around the world. GMM is a cultural diplomacy initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and implemented by Film Independent.
Here Are Your 2025 Film Independent Spirit Awards Nominees
Wow… has it really been 40 years? It sure has, and that’s a reason to celebrate! From our first year at a restaurant on La Cienega Blvd. to a worldwide live stream, the Film Independent Spirit Awards have grown a lot.
That first year the awards, then called the FINDIE (Friends of Independents) Awards, awarded both Marty & Joel Coen the Best Director prize. Since then, we’ve celebrated artists like Spike Lee, Ryan Coogler, Whit Stillman, Robert Rodriguez and Kasi Lemmons, among many, many others. Next month on the blog, we’ll take deep dive into all the history of the awards, so make sure to check back with us to read all about the last 40 years of the Spirit Awards!
This year, we’re headed back to the beach in Santa Monica with returning host and Saturday Night Live alum Aidy Bryant. The show, which will be held at the beach in Santa Monica, will be streamed live on Saturday, February 22, 2025 on the IMDb and Film Independent YouTube channels, and across social platforms.
Spirit Awards winners are voted on exclusively by Film Independent Members. Be sure to join by December 18 to receive access to nominee screeners and full Spirit Awards Member benefits. The Spirit Awards are Film Independent’s largest fundraiser of the year, helping us to continue our mission year-round. And now, here are this year’s nominees:
2025 SPIRIT AWARDS NOMINEES
BEST FEATURE
(Award given to the producer)
Anora
Producers: Sean Baker, Alex Coco, Samantha Quan
I Saw the TV Glow
Producers: Ali Herting, Luca Intili, Dave McCary, Emma Stone, Sarah Winshall
Nickel Boys
Producers: Joslyn Barnes, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, David Levine
Sing Sing
Producers: Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar, Monique Walton
The Substance
Producers: Tim Bevan, Coralie Fargeat, Eric Fellner
BEST FIRST FEATURE
(Award given to director and producer)
Dìdi
Director/Producer: Sean Wang
Producers: Valerie Bush, Carlos López Estrada, Josh Peters
In the Summers
Director: Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio
Producers: Janek Ambros, Lynette Coll, Alexander Dinelaris, Cynthia Fernandez De La Cruz, Cristóbal Güell, Sergio Alberto Lira, Rob Quadrino, Jan Suter, Daniel Tantalean, Nando Vila, Slava Vladimirov, Stephanie Yankwitt
Janet Planet
Director/Producer: Annie Baker
Producers: Andrew Goldman, Dan Janvey, Derrick Tseng
The Piano Lesson
Director: Malcolm Washington
Producers: Todd Black, Denzel Washington
Problemista
Director/Producer: Julio Torres
Producers: Ali Herting, Dave McCary, Emma Stone
JOHN CASSAVETES AWARD
Given to the best feature made for under $1,000,000. (Award given to the writer, director, and producer)
Big Boys
Writer/Director/Producer: Corey Sherman
Producer: Allison Tate
Ghostlight
Writer/Director: Kelly O’Sullivan
Director/Producer: Alex Thompson
Producers: Pierce Cravens, Ian Keiser, Chelsea Krant, Eddie Linker, Alex Wilson
Girls Will Be Girls
Writer/Director/Producer: Shuchi Talati
Producers: Richa Chadha, Claire Chassagne
Jazzy
Writer/Director/Producer: Morrisa Maltz
Writer/Producer: Lainey Shangreaux
Writers: Andrew Hajek, Vanara Taing
Producers: Miranda Bailey, Tommy Heitkamp, John Way, Natalie Whalen, Elliott Whitton
The People’s Joker
Writer/Director: Vera Drew
Writer: Bri LeRose
Producer: Joey Lyons
BEST DIRECTOR
Ali Abbasi
The Apprentice
Sean Baker
Anora
Brady Corbet
The Brutalist
Alonso Ruizpalacios
La Cocina
Jane Schoenbrun
I Saw the TV Glow
BEST SCREENPLAY
Scott Beck, Bryan Woods
Heretic
Jesse Eisenberg
A Real Pain
Megan Park
My Old Ass
Aaron Schimberg
A Different Man
Jane Schoenbrun
I Saw the TV Glow
BEST FIRST SCREENPLAY
Joanna Arnow
The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed
Annie Baker
Janet Planet
India Donaldson
Good One
Julio Torres
Problemista
Sean Wang
Dìdi
BEST LEAD PERFORMANCE
Amy Adams
Nightbitch
Ryan Destiny
The Fire Inside
Colman Domingo
Sing Sing
Keith Kupferer
Ghostlight
Mikey Madison
Anora
Demi Moore
The Substance
Hunter Schafer
Cuckoo
Justice Smith
I Saw the TV Glow
June Squibb
Thelma
Sebastian Stan
The Apprentice
BEST SUPPORTING PERFORMANCE
Yura Borisov
Anora
Joan Chen
Dìdi
Kieran Culkin
A Real Pain
Danielle Deadwyler
The Piano Lesson
Carol Kane
Between the Temples
Karren Karagulian
Anora
Kani Kusruti
Girls Will Be Girls
Brigette Lundy-Paine
I Saw the TV Glow
Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin
Sing Sing
Adam Pearson
A Different Man
BEST BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE
Isaac Krasner
Big Boys
Katy O’Brian
Love Lies Bleeding
Mason Alexander Park
National Anthem
René Pérez Joglar
In the Summers
Maisy Stella
My Old Ass
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Dinh Duy Hung
Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
Jomo Fray
Nickel Boys
Maria von Hausswolff
Janet Planet
Juan Pablo Ramírez
La Cocina
Rina Yang
The Fire Inside
BEST EDITING
Laura Colwell, Vanara Taing
Jazzy
Olivier Bugge Coutté, Olivia Neergaard-Holm
The Apprentice
Anne McCabe
Nightbitch
Hansjörg Weissbrich
September 5
Arielle Zakowski
Dìdi
ROBERT ALTMAN AWARD
Given to one film’s director, casting director, and ensemble cast.
His Three Daughters
Director: Azazel Jacobs
Casting Director: Nicole Arbusto
Ensemble Cast: Jovan Adepo, Jasmine Bracey, Carrie Coon, Jose Febus, Rudy Galvan, Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen, Randy Ramos Jr., Jay O. Sanders
BEST DOCUMENTARY
(Award given to the director and producer)
Gaucho Gaucho
Directors/Producers: Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw
Producers: Christos Konstantakopoulos, Cameron O’Reilly, Matthew Perniciaro
Hummingbirds
Directors: Silvia Del Carmen Castaños, Estefanía “Beba” Contreras
Co-Directors/Producers: Miguel Drake-McLaughlin, Diane Ng, Ana Rodriguez-Falco, Jillian Schlesinger
Producers: Leslie Benavides, Rivkah Beth Medow
No Other Land
Directors/Producers: Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor
Producers: Fabien Greenberg, Bård Kjøge Rønning
Patrice: The Movie
Director: Ted Passon
Producers: Kyla Harris, Innbo Shim, Emily Spivack
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
Director: Johan Grimonprez
Producers: Rémi Grellety, Daan Milius
BEST INTERNATIONAL FILM
(Award given to the director)
All We Imagine as Light
France, India, Netherlands, Luxembourg
Director: Payal Kapadia
Black Dog
China
Director: Guan Hu
Flow
Latvia, France, Belgium
Director: Gints Zilbalodis
Green Border
Poland, France, Czech Republic, Belgium
Director: Agnieszka Holland
Hard Truths
United Kingdom
Director: Mike Leigh
PRODUCERS AWARD presented by Bulleit Frontier Whiskey
The Producers Award, now in its 28th year, honors emerging producers who, despite highly limited resources, demonstrate the creativity, tenacity, and vision required to produce quality independent films.
Alex Coco
Sarah Winshall
Zoë Worth
SOMEONE TO WATCH AWARD
The Someone to Watch Award, now in its 31st year, recognizes a talented filmmaker of singular vision who has not yet received appropriate recognition.
Nicholas Colia
Director of Griffin in Summer
Sarah Friedland
Director of Familiar Touch
Pham Thien An
Director of Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
TRUER THAN FICTION AWARD
The Truer Than Fiction Award, now in its 30th year, is presented to an emerging director of non-fiction features who has not yet received significant recognition.
Julian Brave NoiseCat, Emily Kassie
Directors of Sugarcane
Carla Gutiérrez
Director of Frida
Rachel Elizabeth Seed
Director of A Photographic Memory
BEST NEW NON-SCRIPTED OR DOCUMENTARY SERIES
(Award given to the Creator, Executive Producer, Co-Executive Producer)
Erased: WW2’s Heroes of Color
Executive Producers: Idris Elba, Johanna Woolford Gibbon, Jamilla Dumbuya, Jos Cushing, Khaled Gad, Matt Robins, Chris Muckle, Sean David Johnson, Simon Raikes
Co-Executive Producer: Annabel Hobley
Hollywood Black
Executive Producers: Shayla Harris, Dave Sirulnick, Stacey Reiss, Jon Kamen, Justin Simien, Kyle Laursen, Forest Whitaker, Nina Yang Bongiovi, Jeffrey Schwarz, Amy Goodman Kass, Michael Wright, Jill Burkhart
Co-Executive Producers: David C. Brown, Laurens Grant
Photographer
Executive Producers: Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin, Pagan Harleman, Betsy Forhan
Co-Executive Producers: Anna Barnes, Brent Kunkle
Ren Faire
Executive Producers: Ronald Bronstein, Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie, Eli Bush, Dani Bernfeld, Lance Oppenheim, David Gauvey Herbert, Nancy Abraham, Lisa Heller, Sara Rodriguez
Co-Executive Producers: Abigail Rowe, Christian Vasquez, Max Allman
Social Studies
Creator/Executive Producer: Lauren Greenfield
Executive Producers: Wallis Annenberg, Regina K. Scully, Andrea van Beuren, Frank Evers, Caryn Capotosto
BEST NEW SCRIPTED SERIES
(Award given to the Creator, Executive Producer, Co-Executive Producer)
Baby Reindeer
Creator/Executive Producer: Richard Gadd
Executive Producers: Wim De Greef, Petra Fried, Matt Jarvis, Ed Macdonald
Diarra From Detroit
Creator/Executive Producer: Diarra Kilpatrick
Executive Producers: Kenya Barris, Miles Orion Feldsott, Darren Goldberg
Co-Executive Producers: Ester Lou, Mark Ganek
English Teacher
Creator/Executive Producer: Brian Jordan Alvarez
Executive Producers: Paul Simms, Jonathan Krisel, Dave King
Co-Executive Producers: Kathryn Dean, Jake Bender, Zach Dunn
Fantasmas
Creator/Executive Producer: Julio Torres
Executive Producers: Emma Stone, Dave McCary, Olivia Gerke, Alex Bach, Daniel Powell
Co-Executive Producer: Ali Herting
Shōgun
Creators/Executive Producers: Rachel Kondo, Justin Marks
Executive Producers: Edward L. McDonnell, Michael De Luca, Michaela Clavell
Co-Executive Producers: Shannon Goss, Andrew Macdonald, Allon Reich, Jamie Vega Wheeler
BEST LEAD PERFORMANCE IN A NEW SCRIPTED SERIES
Brian Jordan Alvarez
English Teacher
Richard Gadd
Baby Reindeer
Lily Gladstone
Under the Bridge
Kathryn Hahn
Agatha All Along
Cristin Milioti
The Penguin
Julianne Moore
Mary & George
Hiroyuki Sanada
Shōgun
Anna Sawai
Shōgun
Andrew Scott
Ripley
Julio Torres
Fantasmas
BEST SUPPORTING PERFORMANCE IN A NEW SCRIPTED SERIES
Tadanobu Asano
Shōgun
Enrico Colantoni
English Teacher
Betty Gilpin
Three Women
Chloe Guidry
Under the Bridge
Moeka Hoshi
Shōgun
Stephanie Koenig
English Teacher
Patti LuPone
Agatha All Along
Nava Mau
Baby Reindeer
Ruth Negga
Presumed Innocent
Brian Tee
Expats
BEST BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE IN A NEW SCRIPTED SERIES
Jessica Gunning
Baby Reindeer
Diarra Kilpatrick
Diarra From Detroit
Joe Locke
Agatha All Along
Megan Stott
Penelope
Hoa Xuande
The Sympathizer
BEST ENSEMBLE CAST IN A NEW SCRIPTED SERIES
How to Die Alone
Ensemble Cast: Melissa DuPrey, Jaylee Hamidi, KeiLyn Durrel Jones, Arkie Kandola, Elle Lorraine, Michelle McLeod, Chris “CP” Powell, Conrad Ricamora, Natasha Rothwell, Jocko Sims
Congratulations to all of the nominees, and remember to tune in to the 40th Film Independent Spirit Awards on Saturday, February 22, 2025, which will be helmed by returning host and Saturday Night Live alum Aidy Bryant. The show, taking place at the beach in Santa Monica, will be streamed live on the IMDb and Film Independent YouTube channels, and across our social platforms.
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Editor Hansjörg Weißbrich on Infusing Authenticity and Tension in Newsroom Drama ‘September 5’
For 22 nail-biting, torturous hours in a crammed studio in Munich during the 1972 Olympics, an ABC Sports broadcast crew suddenly found itself in the middle of the action when violence broke out in the Olympic Village and Israeli athletes were taken hostage. In writer-director Tim Fehlbaum’s gripping take on that historical day, September 5 follows young and ambitious producer Geoff Mason (Robert Altman recipient John Magaro) and legendary TV executive Roone Arledge (Spirit Award nominee Peter Sarsgaard), who led a valiant effort to report the deadly event to the world, inadvertently broadcasting a terrorist attack live on the air for the first time in history.
We recently spoke to veteran picture editor Hansjörg Weißbrich (Unorthodox, She Said), who is singularly qualified for this project thanks to a combination of his German language skills and his familiarity with analog editing equipment prevalent in the film.
Before we start, I just want to say that you worked on one of my favorite foreign language films, I’m Your Man, by Maria Schrader.
Thank you so much! It’s interesting that you mention it – that’s a relatively small German production which made it into the world. I actually got a job through it on a New Zealand production called We Were Dangerous, which I think should be released soon. It’s produced by Taika Waititi. After they saw I’m Your Man, that’s when they contacted me.
How wonderful! It’s such a quiet, subtle story, but it also explores so many thought-provoking questions about what it really means to find the perfect partner in life. It makes one question the need for perfection.
It was a brilliant script by Maria Schrader and her partner, Jan Schomburg, one of the best scripts I’ve read. Maria and I have been working together for almost 15 years now.
On September 5, I really liked the opening sequence using the real ABC footage from the 1972 Olympics. Those first few minutes highlight the optimism to juxtapose the terrorist act that will sadly follow. What was your process of cutting that opening sequence?
It’s great that you mentioned that, because that’s exactly what we wanted to create—the feeling of optimism. The Olympics at that time were designed to highlight the changes in Germany after WWII. So, it was designed as the serene Olympic Games, and all of a sudden, that terrible attack happened. So, it was very important to create that feeling in the beginning, to highlight the stakes that were ultimately shattered by the attacks. We had two ways to approach that. One was to not show the ABC spot in the beginning, but a little later, when Geoff first enters the studio, they could be in the middle of reporting. Ultimately, it was better to start with that TV spot to immediately convey that optimism. We also wanted to provide the audience with all the information right away—where we are and the setting—in a very tight way.
The authenticity really shines through with all the analog technology—you see the map books, the analog switchboards, and how they had to physically organize the alphabets to generate the captions and title cards on the screen.
Tim and the production designer Julian Wagner collected all that stuff. They wanted all of it to really work so the actors could really play with them, which helps create that authenticity. That 16mm editing table you see in the film was very familiar for me. I started cutting feature films on a Steenbeck editing table before switching to Avid during the 90s, when we transitioned from analog editing to digital editing. That was like traveling back in time for me.
That’s pretty cool that you’re very familiar with that vintage equipment. I assumed they were props and didn’t work.
No, it was all functioning. They needed to train the actors a little bit. But I was the best person to edit that footage since I could tell if they made a mistake.
The film is very gripping, which is not easy to do where most of the scenes are people talking and editing in a newsroom. How did you add that suspense and dramatic tension?
We tried to cut it as tight as possible. Tim and his DoP Markus Förderer shot it like a documentary film team would. They didn’t do a lot of rehearsals and just covered everything, followed the actors, and the flow of it. Shot with two handheld cameras, it had a lot of dynamic movement to it, and no take was the same. So, we had a lot of footage to choose from to create that dynamic feeling. And you’re completely right—it could have easily been a static situation with these people who never leave the studio. The [TV] monitors are their windows to the outside world, so you don’t feel like you’re stuck in that studio, you always have that view to the outside. It was tricky to balance the time we spent on the ticking-clock atmosphere with the emotional beats, which are very important. We wanted the emotional parts to feel like a gut punch, for example, when they discuss the moral dilemma about how far they can go, whether they can show someone being shot on live television if things go south. Another pivotal part is when they eventually learn that all the hostages are gone, leading up to the iconic moment when Jim McKay announces that to the world.
Speaking of the emotional beats, this story takes a firm stance on journalistic ethics. We see Geoff and the team questioning whether they can go live with a story without two confirmed sources, or when he tells the anchor to just go with it and use the phrase “as we’re hearing” to deflect any potential liability. Can you talk about that?
That’s one of the most important scenes in the whole film. That was the first time the Olympics was broadcast live worldwide. When the attacks happened, it made that Olympics the first time an act of terror was broadcast live. There was no precedent for them. Now, everyone has an iPhone and uploads everything on social media without much consideration. This makes the story so timely—it reminds us how important it is to be responsible with images, and the power that images have. That’s what we hope the audience would get from the film, to evaluate responsible journalism in these times of “fake news.”
It really brings you back to a time when journalistic integrity was a reliable certainty.
Yeah. The film shows how complicated it was at the time, because they had to wait for the picture to come back. This is also part of the movie—it was a huge challenge in editing to build up to the moment [of finally seeing the masked terrorists on the balcony] without showing the picture. There’s a lot of reporting before we actually see the images. In terms of editing, we decided to use the full frame for the first time when they go on air with that picture. Peter Jennings tells us what he sees over the phone, but we had to create the powerful moment once we show the picture, when the film footage was brought into the studio after it was developed and processed. Only then could they watch it for the first time at the editing table before broadcasting it to the world. Today, all that happens in an instant.
What were some of the more challenging sequences to edit?
It was a big challenge to find the right tonality. For example, when they first go on air, there were two story layers we could highlight. We had Geoff’s excitement to get the broadcast running, or we could highlight the terrible news, which Jim McKay was reporting to the world at that moment. That was our main question throughout the film, when to highlight the action versus the drama. As an editor, I approached the whole film more as a drama with some thriller elements than a straight thriller. We had to balance the drama part of the story carefully because we wanted to be respectful. We didn’t want to manipulate it in any way out of respect for the tragedy.
Another aspect I really enjoyed about this is that language became a big part of the plot once production assistant Marianne Gebhardt played by Leonie Benesch is suddenly pulled in as the only German interpreter for Geoff’s American crew. Amidst all that chaos, she became a crucial information clearinghouse.
That was another delicate part of the editing because I had to balance the two languages. We always hear the original and then the translation. That was a very nuanced part of my work to get that right, to highlight a bit of the original but still have the translation on top.
Much of this film involves matching what was shot with the archival footage and newsreels. Can you talk mixing the two components?
The archive footage was an integral part of the script. Tim and his co-writer, Moritz Binder, did extensive research because Tim wanted to be extremely accurate. They got access to ABC’s original broadcast tapes, but it wasn’t clear if we could get the rights until two weeks before shooting. We were lucky to finally get it since Tim wanted to use Jim McKay from the original footage, instead of reenacting with an actor. Jim wasn’t always on-screen, so we needed to build around what we actually had on him, but it worked out quite well. We found a way to match it with parts of the archive footage that we recreated, for example, for the scenes at the balcony. Tim wanted to recreate that out of respect for the families of the victims, he didn’t want to show the real hostages at the window. We were lucky that we could shoot those at the original location, since not so much has changed in that spot. That Olympic Village has since become a World Heritage site for architectural reasons. Tim studied in Munich at some point and I think he has stayed there, it’s a students’ apartments now.
It’s even more astounding since this is now almost 51 years later.
Yeah, really amazing. Actually, now that we’re talking about it, I remember that I also stayed there when I first started in the film industry. I think I worked on a student film there and spent two or three weeks in one of those apartments. That’s amazing! That just came to my mind!
Wow! That IS really cool!
I spent 15 years in Munich when I first started working as an editor. The very first feature film that I’d cut was produced by Thomas Wöbke, one of the producers of September 5. We’ve known each other for 30 years, so this was a nice reunion.
September 5 will be in select theaters on December 13 before expanding nationwide on January 17, 2025.
For over 40 years, Film Independent has helped filmmakers get their projects made and seen. The nonprofit organization’s core mission is to champion creative independence in visual storytelling and support a community of artists who embody diversity, innovation and uniqueness of vision.
Film Independent Members watch nominees and vote for the winners of the Spirit Awards. To become a Member of Film Independent and make your vote count for next year’s 40th Annual Spirit Awards, just click here. To support our mission with a donation, click here.
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‘Anora’ Costume Designer Jocelyn Pierce on Crafting A Stripper-themed Fairy Tale
Frequent Spirit Award nominee for The Florida Project and Tangerine, writer-director Sean Baker’s latest film returns to the world of sex workers. A stripper-themed Cinderella story, Anora stars Mikey Madison as the titular stripper, Anora/”Ani.” Set in Brooklyn, New York, the story follows her during an eventful two weeks as she tries to find her place in her slice of the Russian-speaking neighborhood of Brighton Beach. Desperate to eke her way out of her stripper days, she can’t believe her luck when a heir to a Russian oligarch, Ivan “Vanya” (Mark Eydelshteyn), falls head over heels for her. Within days, they are married, and she is suddenly thrust into a world of new money opulence. However, when Vanya’s parents find out about the marriage, their enforcers quickly descend on the young couple. Is Vanya her knight in shining armor? Or has the nightmare only begun ….?
We recently spoke with costume designer Jocelyn Pierce about crafting the various looks for Baker’s contemporary tale of ambition, love, and betrayal.
You worked on one of my favorite films from last year, Spirit Award winner Richard Linklater’s charming comedy-noir, Hit Man.
Thank you! Juliana Hoffpauir was the designer and I was her costume supervisor. It was very fun to work on.
On Anora, what did you want Ani’s clothes and jewelry to say about her motivations and state of mind?
There wasn’t a specific thing that I was trying with her looks, other than I wanted them to serve the story and her performance. The choices speak to her job. Where she works isn’t a traditional pole dancing club, it’s a lap dancing club in our film. So, there’s a practicality. For instance, the girls in the club have to wear one-piece dresses. For that look, we wanted really shiny material or textures that could catch light very well. Her first look in the club is this great leather dress that zips down the front and the material has a very attractive sheen to it.
How long were you on Anora and was it all filmed around New York?
We started pre-production in December and finished around April. We were in Brighton Beach and Midtown Manhattan for all of it, besides the week in Vegas.
How big was your team?
It was me, Jonie Bertin, and Murrie Rosenfeld. I love those ladies! They’re so creative. It was a small team, but we were so in sync with each other.
How many costumes did you have for Ani?
It was something like 27 costumes. We see her in a few different worlds even though the film takes place over the course of two weeks. From a costume perspective, I broke down the film into three categories: the club, the girlfriend week, and then, wifey.
How did you start creating her varying looks?
I started with mood boards of visually interesting looks for a young woman who is a dancer in a lap-dancing club. We spent a lot of time researching in the club that we actually filmed at and met many dancers. Our [production] offices were in Brighton Beach, so we spent a lot of time with that community. It felt like a cultural anthropological dig of the people that we’re representing. Sean had his own ideas and Mikey did incredible research too, she was really fully immersed [into the character.] It was a very fluid collaboration.
What about Ani’s “girlfriend look” when she spends the week with Vanya at his mansion?
Her girlfriend look is more about who she is in her personal style, maybe showing some of her aspirations. A lot of people are talking about the electric blue Hervé Léger bandage dress she wears on her first trip to the mansion. I’ve seen these TikTok videos about that dress, and it’s thrilling to hear everyone’s take on the significance of that dress. It’s a status symbol signifier for Ani. She works hard and she’s got her own aspirations to make it out of this working-class situation—she’s dressing for the job she wants.
After they get married, Ani and Vanya spend most of their time chilling at the mansion.
She gets more playful as she gets into “wifey” mode, because then, she’s got money to play with and access to more of the clothes that she actually wants to wear. I hope it looks like there’s an arc to the film when it comes to her personal style. We had a lot of things in the room and just worked from our gut. Once we all started to know our characters a lot better, then you can tell when things feel right. We were just living with Ani and getting to know her.
What did you like or sympathize about Ani’s character?
I have a lot of respect for Ani; there’s a strength to her that’s admirable, a sense of ownership that she has over herself that was really beautiful. She works hard, she’s tough, but we also get a hint of vulnerability at the end of the film that’s relatable.
You’re referring to the scene with Igor (Yura Borisov) in the car, right? I love how he inadvertently ends up being the compassionate vector in the story.
He’s the empathy and the kindness in the movie. I’ve heard beautiful feedback from those who have seen this film, and that’s the thing that people seem to be ruminating on. It’s nice that it’s so thought-provoking. Annie is really vulnerable in that moment, which is relatable. We’ve all experienced heartbreak or loss in whatever way. I also love her strength throughout the movie, but we get to see a window into her vulnerability as well.
What was the process of crafting Vanya’s look?
Mark was so instrumental in finding the nuance and the details. When we started with his mood boards, it was mostly luxury fashion. When we met Mark, he’s charming, eclectic, fun and playful, which didn’t exactly fit our first impression of his character. He introduced us to many Russian designers that I wasn’t aware of. We used the Russian designer, Roma Uvarov, a lot in the film. Vanya is a gamer, so he’s into some street wear. We were lucky to have all these Brooklyn artists making custom pieces for him. I loved the mix of high-end fashion and street wear for him, because he really is still such a kid, a reckless, youthful kid, but he’s also charming.
For either Vanya or Ani’s wardrobe, did your team have to make anything from scratch? Or were they custom designs and off-the-shelf items that you embellished?
For Ani, we shopped most of it because it’s contemporary. Many of her dancer outfits were from real dancer stores in New York. We tried as much as possible to work with smaller, independent designers. We also had great vintage archives to pull from. Since this movie is set and shot in New York, we wanted to represent as many New York designers as possible.
What were some of your favorite costumes on this film?
I really love the wedding looks for both Vanya and Ani, when they got married in the Little White Chapel in Vegas. She’s in this cream-colored corset and cut-off denim shorts, and he wears a custom blazer with basketball shorts. I think that encapsulate their characters. I love how like impromptu and romantic it was—we chose to find pieces that would be in their suitcase rather than an overly-styled wedding look. I also love Ani’s blue dress. I love all of their Vegas clothes, including her lace white two-piece. Vanya takes some big swings with his leopard skin Dolce and Gabbana shirts.
What would you like audiences to take away from this film?
I’ve been really moved by the response from the audience. I see on Instagram that there’s a line of people around the block at an independent cinema for a movie about a human story that’s not about superheroes. There’s this need for human stories. People feel so connected to it and are moved by it. When we were making the film, we all felt strongly about independent film and making art, and the fact that people are resonating with it is so beautiful. It feels important. My friends from Brighton Beach were moved by how Brighton Beach is represented in the film. On Instagram, I’ve been getting a lot of DMs from young Russian designers and young Russian people thanking me for how Vanya was represented—he looked real to them. It’s nice to have people feel represented and seen. Especially with the tough year year-and-a-half that the film industry has endured, for an independent film to be making a splash like this, it feels really important.
Anora is playing in theaters now.
For over 40 years, Film Independent has helped filmmakers get their projects made and seen. The nonprofit organization’s core mission is to champion creative independence in visual storytelling and support a community of artists who embody diversity, innovation and uniqueness of vision.
Film Independent Members watch nominees and vote for the winners of the Spirit Awards. To become a Member of Film Independent and make your vote count for next year’s 40th Annual Spirit Awards, just click here. To support our mission with a donation, click here.
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Interview: Jomo Fray, ‘Nickel Boys’ Cinematographer Pt.2: Creating the POV Style
Earlier this week we shared part one of our conversation with Nickel Boys cinematographer, Jomo Fray. There, we talked about how he got involved with Nickel Boys, and his path to get there including being a Film Independent Project Involve Fellow. For part two, we get into the nitty gritty of shooting a film in first person POV, and what advice Jomo has for emerging filmmakers.
This interview was conducted by another Project Involve fellow from his cohort, Film Independent’s own Joenique C. Rose.
I was going to ask about the technical part of the film because my mind was just blown. I hear you talk about the use of the body rig and the dolly and the remote head. I don’t know if you can describe it in a way where people who are going to be reading this will understand, but at least for some of those scenes, the body rig, can you describe that and maybe what camera or cameras you had to use in this particular movie?
Absolutely. So one thing that was important to me is I really wanted to stay on a singular camera system. We shot on the Sony Venice and my team would have different builds of the camera, basically different modular designs that it could fit into for different setups.
Like if I wanted to do handheld, that felt more connected to the spine of a body, a full body movement, then maybe shoulder handheld would work. Other times, if I wanted the perspective to feel like it was coming from the neck, so a body was stationary, but a neck can move quickly in a way that holding a camera on the shoulder doesn’t often articulate. So then it would be putting the camera in the Realto mode.
It was separating the camera block from the camera brain with an umbilical cord so that the grip would be holding a backpack with the brain of the camera to an umbilical cord, so I could just hold the camera block and then be able to quickly maneuver the perspective of that because I was holding it and it was moving from my wrist.
It’s a funny thing in this movie where ideally it feels organic. Ideally it feels obvious that it just feels like, ‘oh, well, this is the only way you would see this.’ And it must’ve been somewhat simple to do. But the funny thing is just the level of orchestration any given shot took from my entire team having to be in harmony with each other about what we were about to do with any scene.
We didn’t want to have the actors have more artifice than they needed to. Oftentimes we would try hard to not have lights or stands on set and do a lot of the lighting with reflective sources and mirrors outside of buildings pushing light into the space. You know, it built it into a way where– I remember one shot in particular, as Elwood is sitting on a bus, a young girl crawls between the seats.
He looks down and then he looks under the chair to see her continuing to crawl underneath the chairs of the bus until she goes back to her parents. The shot is literally maybe 40 seconds of the movie. But for that shot, it meant we were on a moving bus, a moving period bus.
That meant that the grip team had to essentially lift every seat that was in the bus to clear it out. We then had to lift a dolly into the bus. We had to bring dolly track into the bus. We had to strap dolly track onto the frame of the bus, put the dolly there, basically have a remote head in mimic mode so I can be in the back of the bus shooting handheld and I can look down on my body and the remote head would match my movement to look down the actor’s body.
For that movement of just looking under your chair, it would involve while the bus is moving, the dolly grip, dollying forward, booming down, and then me in the back with the remote head, inverting the remote head to look underneath my own legs so that the camera looked underneath the chair for this moment and seeing the light play on the young girl’s face because the bus is moving through space.
That took everyone, the focus puller, the dolly grip, everyone had to know their marks, but in a way that the marks all had to just feel totally seamless. It had to feel not like we were getting a clean boom down, but it had to feel the way a neck feels preening over, the way it feels like when a lot of your weight and your center of gravity is low, but your neck is going over your knees. If any one person is off, even by a second in that motion, it seems mechanical and it looks strange, but when everyone is all cued correctly and cued naturally, all of a sudden it feels obvious.
It feels ideally organic, but again, every single scene was like that. Every single scene necessitated a unique camera system and a unique approach, which involved a lot of coordination with everyone. And we didn’t give marks for any of the actors.
We didn’t want them to feel more artifice than they needed to. So again, it was our remarkable first AC, Kali Riley, having to feel every scene, every take. And every take I might do a different maneuver because even in the times when I would be operating, it should feel like a human gaze and it should feel like someone experiencing their life.
The gaze could never be in front of the action. It was always responding to action. When you’re operating the camera as well, and when you’re operating focus it, we had to almost do different maneuvers each take, so that each take had a sense of its own wonderment, a sense of its own lack of design, that it was the gaze finding things anew each time, even though again, those were meticulously laid out.
On the beginning of every day, Nora Mendes, the production designer, would take RaMell and I and walk us through the room and she would say, okay, here are 10 hero items in the room. You can interact with any of these. These are really interesting. These are telling aspects of the story. And so over the course of the take, you can hit them in any order. You can hit eight of them. You can hit two of them. You can hit none of them. But here they all are as almost these miniature base camps in any given set.
And almost all the sets had to be 360s because they had to be able to incorporate the camera flowing through them. And they had to be under heavy scrutiny because if there’s a character that isn’t in front of the camera, naturally the gaze just shifts to a table. It shifts to a wall.
A lot of the production design had to be under heavy scrutiny. And the camera also had to have these little base camps around the space that it could still find ways to find a new image each take to maintain, again, that concept of sentience that I think was really important for RaMell.
I felt when I was watching the movie, I was watching it, of course, for the story. But then I would find myself in awe of what the movement of the camera was doing that I would be like, OK, OK, now follow the story, follow the story. But it seemed very seamless.
For something like the bus, right? It’s only 40 seconds in the movie. For your team and for the day, was that half a day? Was that a full day? Did you have opportunities to even block or rehearse, or did you want the actors just to come in and work their way through the scene without having to have a lot of that rehearsal already embedded in them?
We had a fair bit of rehearsal throughout it, because it was also in rehearsals that I was able to look at the actors and look at how they were playing the scene, where their gaze was going, where their eyes were going, how they emotionally sat with the ideas that were being brought up in the scene.
That was just such a big inspiration for me anytime I would be operating the camera and moving the cameras, basing it off of a lot of Ethan and Brandon’s performance and the ways in which they would rehearse through the scene and how RaMell would direct them.
But, you know, even for seeds that were that small, I was just so incredibly lucky to have such an unbelievable team on the ground in New Orleans. The gaffer, Bob Bates, the key grip, Gary Kelso, both of their rigging teams were exceptional. Our camera team led by Kali Riley.
Everyone knew from the onset that this movie was full of essentially trick shots and trick wonders. Early on in prep, all of our teams were talking about, okay, each scene, what’s the camera system for this scene? Okay, this scene, do we need the body rig? The first ACs, the key grip and the whole team just had an itemized list of everything we needed for each scenes.
I’m thankful to Gary Kelso and his team, the key grip for bringing in so many experiments just during prep. So we were constantly just trying to, even when we didn’t have the full camera system, just trying to engineer a lot of these systems and these setups so that when we came on game day, for the bus scene, for example, despite the orchestration of that, it probably only took a few hours because it was something we had been practicing for weeks and we had been talking about and we’d been thinking about.
But that attention and closeness came down for every scene where we just had a plan A, a plan B and a plan C for trying to approach any of the perspectives. Because again, it’s that weird thing that even though you test it, even though you talk about it, so many of these things can be uncanny when you put them up.
I think that by the end of the film, it was incredible and magical just the way that we could so quickly, modularly slot into our different looks and our different configurations, because we came meticulously planning out a lot of things and also planning out that we knew that we were doing something that people haven’t shot like this in a long time. And people certainly haven’t shot these communities like this before. And most filmmakers aren’t like RaMell and are looking for the things RaMell is looking for.
So I think that we were just so, so lucky to have such experts. Truly, I feel like we had some of the best people in the world for some of the positions that they were working on. They were so giving of themselves that it really allowed us to do so much more than would ever be believed based on our shooting schedule.
For the moments of the older character, did you shoot in chronological order of the film, or did you have to jump around? And how did that go?
Yeah, we still block shot it and jumped around. Daveed is such an exceptional actor. And that was an instance where it’s like, for all of the older Elwood moments, we shot them on a Snorricam rig.
So it is, it’s essentially a metal chassis that sits in the midsection of the actor. And then there are a set of poles that come out of it that basically hold and attach the camera almost to the body of the actor themselves.
There’s an interesting way that traditionally Snorricam is not used in this way. Traditionally, it’s for either action movies, there are some uses of it in Requiem for a Dream, where they shot Bolex for some of the almost like second person perspectives. But for us, we really wanted to give this– it was always a question of what is the nature of trauma? And how does trauma change our relationship to ourselves from first person to maybe something like second person for Elwood as he gets older.
And the interesting thing there was that there were these moments where Daveed and I would be looking at the image together. And we’d be again, talking in these emotional ways of talking about what the image means emotionally, and how to convey emotion through that image. And so we’d both be looking at the monitor, and he would have the Snorricam chassis attached to himself.
And he would be like, okay, so maybe I open up the right side of my shoulder to bring the character in. But you know, when I’m feeling a little more internal, maybe I close down the right side of my body and shifts out of the frame. And I’d be like, yeah, you know, go with that. Make that decision. Don’t be afraid to imbue the way you’re moving with the emotions and put that into the camera. But you know, those are just some of the ways where for this movie, there was a real cross-pollination.
There are aspects of co-authoring where an actor would have a body rig. So they would be controlling the composition, and I would never give them marks to tell them how to do it. But we would talk through the emotions of that moment and what they might be able to show and not show with the motion of their body.
And, you know, there were instances where, you know, in scenes where Hattie, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s character comes to Nickel and she hugs Turner, that’s me, she’s physically hugging. That changes how you shoot an image when you are quite literally inside the scene, when you’re responding not only to an actor, but now a scene partner. Because there are ways in which the cameras, meaning to imbue Elwood’s perspective or Turner’s perspective, their emotions, their feelings, where their gaze goes, says a lot about what they’re feeling.
So again, it came back to watching the actors during rehearsal and then inside of the scene, really responding to those things as a camera operator and as a cinematographer, which was, you know, just such an electric experience. There was a moment on one of the first days that Aunjanue came to set, she was shooting a scene that happens at Nickel, where she’s talking with Elwood and she’s about to deliver some pretty hard news to him. And I think, so I was watching the first one, so as I was operating the camera in that moment, for me as Jomo, thinking through Elwood’s feelings, I’m like, when someone is telling me news that I know is devastating them to deliver, it’s difficult for me to look them in the eye.
In that moment that Aunjanue as Hattie is trying to express what happened with the lawyer, my gaze drifted off. And with my gaze, the camera drifted off of seeing her and looking at the details on the table. And there’s this moment where Aunjanue put her hand out across the table and said, Elwood, look at me, son.
And the camera drifts back and makes eye contact with her in the moment where she knows she has to deliver to her grandson, something that she knows that he knows is devastating, but he has to see her say it. And there was a way in which that was completely improvisational, that didn’t, that was not in the script, that was, you know, Aunjanue’s brilliance in that moment. But I remember after we, after RaMell called cut on that, I remember running back to him at the monitor and he and I were both like, whoa, like this is what the sentient perspective is about.
This is why it’s interesting. It’s not just that it’s inside the scene, it’s not just that it’s immersive, but it’s that the camera itself has to be in response to the actors and the actors can fundamentally change where the gaze of the camera goes. And like the, that connection felt so profound to both of us.
And we got goosebumps while we were seeing it on set. And I think that that moment changed a lot of our thoughts around operating the camera and what the image really was, where it needed to truly be, the camera needs to be as vulnerable as Elwood or Turner would be in that moment. The camera truly was sharing the scene with the actors.
It wasn’t even capturing the scene from inside, it was inside. We are living life concurrently with Turner and Elwood and that creates a different level of intimacy between audience to character. And that felt profound and special.
And I just feel so grateful that the actors were so giving of themselves to invite me, invite the camera and invite looking down the lens into their process. But they were just so incredibly giving them that way. And, you know, in a lot of ways, we would just be working so closely together.
The actors would be close to me while I would be operating so that their hand is in it, or their foot is in it. They would still have a tight eyeline with the other actor in the scene to still create that connection. It wasn’t falling into artifice if it didn’t have to, that there still was a prioritization of these kinds of emotional bonds between actors.
“That changes how you shoot an image when you are quite literally inside the scene, when you’re responding not only to an actor, but now a scene partner.”
The camera team and the actors are working closely. The key grips are fitting custom bills to some of the actors. They’re working closely. There was a real way that I feel like there was just a real intimacy and kinship shared across the crew at different levels in a way that traditionally doesn’t often happen just because of the technique forced us to be in a lot closer proximity in all ways.
I hope that that really comes across in the image, just how intimate that connection was and a little bit of that almost like cross-pollination between artists of actor, of cinematographer, performer, of image maker.
I do remember that scene that you’re talking about with Aunjanue reaching over and just her looking at the camera but looking at us. In the theater, I felt it, you know, in my spirit when she was delivering her news. So you absolutely did capture that moment.
But I understand what you’re saying about really being vulnerable. It’s for the actor unlearning ‘Don’t look down the barrel, having the emotions to look at a camera, but still as if you’re talking to a human individual.
I would say that from day one to I guess day thirty, I’m sure the cast and the crew became very close, because you’re just in these intimate spaces with each other telling a very vulnerable story. I’m sure the relationships that you all forged are solidified for life because of the nature of the project.
Totally. It was secretly the highest praise to me across the set when I would go to Video Village and I would see the teamsters creeping in and looking around to monitor, where it feels like everyone’s invested.
I remember talking to the pit boss and him being like, ‘So you guys are shooting POV. Like, what is that? Like, how does the cut work?’ And he would ask me deeply technical questions about like, ‘What did you test? How does the film going to look? How is this going to move into that?’ And I remember being like, why don’t you come up to set?
He’d be like, you think this is going to work? And I’m like, we did a lot of testing, and we hope it does, but you know, we’re doing our best.
And there was something again, that felt really exciting about this project where it just felt like every single person at every single level of the project knew we were doing something that people traditionally do not do, knew it was high concept, knew we were after not just something that was high concept, but trying to chase something poetic with this high concept type approach.
And there really was a fun excitement across the entire production and seeing people sneaking into video village who don’t normally care to see monitors, really was exciting and really felt like we were doing something special.
What would you say was your favorite scene to shoot?
And then what, after now seeing it all together, is that still your favorite scene to watch? Or is there something now you’re like, ‘oh man, no, that. That was the one.’
You know, it’s funny. I think that something RaMell had always said from the very first conversation is he said that an image can’t have a singular meaning. We always have to pack every image with almost as, as symbolically dense as possible to create multiple things that were operating inside of the image, multiple things that as a viewer, you could grab on to, to understand the interaction that was at play.
For example, if a shot is walking into a room, there’s a question of the socioeconomics of the space. You see the sleeve of your character, their sleeve is a bit tattered, which tells a socioeconomic story of the person whose gaze you’re inside.
And then the juxtaposition between that space and their sleeve maybe speaks to how comfortable or uncomfortable they are seeing how people interact and make contact or don’t make eye contact with them. Also, it tells you about the comfort of the people inside the place to this person coming into their space.
We always wanted to make it dense so that the eye could really take in a lot of things in the frame. Because we really strive to do that in every shot in the movie, each time I watch it, I think I fundamentally see totally different things or make totally different connections, which is so funny and interesting about it in a way that I have never quite experienced with something I’ve worked on.
I think which really speaks to RaMell’s brilliance as an artist bringing in so many disparate ways of understanding the text that he was building made it so scenes and certain lines that I might not have noticed on my first few watches really stick out to me now.
There’s a scene where adult Elwood is talking to adult Chickie Pete in a bar. There are certain lines of dialogue that now hit me more profoundly having seen the movie a few times because it connects to an image earlier that I just never thought of those two things almost visually rhyming together, but I see that they do now.
And in terms of favorite moment for me now, weirdly, it keeps changing to me because of what I’m saying, just making different connections to pieces, but I think something that always has stood out to me was I loved shooting the boxing scene and when we first talked about the movie, again, the two things RaMell said was that he wanted to be point of view, and he didn’t want to ever see on-screen violence. He was uninterested in fetishizing the aspect of violence on these bodies.
And so even when he was talking about the boxing scene, I remember him explicitly saying, I don’t want to see Big Chet and Griff fight. I don’t care about what’s happening inside the ring. The entirety of this scene is all about the economic ecosystem that is happening outside of the ring.
It became this fun conversation with me and the gaffer, Bob Bates, where it’s like, what’s important is in this scene isn’t the shaft of light that’s hitting the center of the arena, but it’s actually the scene happening between the line between lightness and dark. It’s happening right on the edges of perceivable vision where money’s being exchanged, where people are making bets, where there’s this just fraught moving Jaime, someone who’s half Mexican moving into the white seating. There’s this rich interpersonal dynamic that is happening on the fringes of this fight that reflect why this fight is happening in the first place.
That scene was so fun to shoot, and it morphs and breaks some of the rules we had built with the visual language leading up to that place, knowing that we wanted that scene to feel different and to feel special. And ideally, it’s a scene that the audience is understanding what we’re doing with point of view. We can actually bend some of the rules on how those points of views are working. And we can be a little bit more aggressive on making cuts and edits where initially in the film, we ideally want to ease the viewer into the process of learning how to understand the movie. I think that was a fun scene because we got to take all the limiters off and really go buck wild on it.
And particularly there’s a shot that comes up at the end of the movie, almost as a moment of reverie of Griff in the boxing ring with Spencer moving around him. And we shot that at a really low frame rate and step-printed it up. Spencer is almost this blur that’s moving around Griff as Griff is training in the ring. That was a shot that RaMell came up with a few days before and was like, I want this moment of reverie. I want to see almost something of Turner’s imagination of the afterwards of the fight and Griff and Griff’s spirit.
That was just such a fun shot because we came in on the day knowing we wanted to do something slow frame rate and find something that was evocative to all of us. It was a real collaboration between RaMell, Bob [Bates, Chief Lighting Technician], the gaffer, Gary [Kelso, Key Grip], and we all just stood by monitor and kept turning things off, turning things on, redesigning, rebuilding, re-shifting, something like that. And I remember when we fell on the image and we shot a take of it at a low frame rate, there was just this palpable like, ‘Whoa. That’s something really evocative.’ And it was one of the last shots of the day, but it really ended the day strong, and the entire crew was somberly like, okay, that’s the moment.
And I think still has that quality to me that when I see it, I don’t see the things that we did. I just get caught up in the emotion of that shot, which I think continually feels special each time I watch the movie.
This is my last question. For the aspiring, the emerging, the ‘I’ve shot a few things, but like now is my time, I want to get that first feature under my belt’ filmmaker, what does preparedness look like for a cinematographer entering conversations that could potentially land them their first feature?
What advice, what tips would you give them so that they could properly enter that space with confidence and know that they’ve done what they could to visually say, ‘this is how I would approach this project’?
I feel like the most beautiful thing to me about feature filmmaking is what you learn about yourself. Every single project, every single film I’ve done, I learned something new about myself. I learned something that is a place for me to work on, something for me to continue to develop. It’s an aspect to it that I love about feature filmmaking is it’s deeply humbling.
And I think there’s a beauty in always being re-reminded of how much you still are able to learn, and what you still need to learn, and the different ways you can be an artist in the future.
But towards your question, I would say, it is about reading the script, really trying to understand the emotions of the script, really trying to understand the emotional motivations of the characters, and doing your best to push all of the visual preconceptions out of your mind to try to just take in what is the cinema on the page? What is the cinema that the director is expressing to you?
As cinematographers, we often feel like we need to be talking. We need to know all the gear. We need to know how we’re going to do something. We need to know that we’ve tested every lens, and this is the one that we love.
But I think the more I work, the more I realize that actually so much of cinematography is actually just listening. It’s not speaking.
It’s listening to the story from the script. It’s listening to what the script wants to be, not what you want to make it. It’s listening to the performance of the actors.
It’s listening to the interpersonal dynamics on set outside of the character, but what is happening that day. It’s listening to your director. It’s listening not just the story that your director is telling, the story your director wants to want to tell.
And it’s listening and then being daring enough to think that you’re enough, to think that you, whoever you are, have had enough life experiences, that once you’ve listened to all the things that are coming at you, that the things you have to say back are interesting, are evocative, are powerful, are moving. And I think just truly believing that you have something to give to the movie. I think filmmaking is just too grueling to not be a game that anyone plays if they don’t have a love of the game.
So if you’re at the table and if you’re trying to get your feature, you clearly love filmmaking. And I think that trusting both that love and trusting that that love puts you in a position where you have something to also say back to movies is, I think, something that’s so important, especially in those early features where self-doubt feels the most palpable.
But ultimately, I think if you’re at that place, you have something that you want to say. And then I think it comes down to listening to other people to inform what you do say.
Thank you so much. This has been wonderful.
Detail Oriented: ‘Nickel Boys’ DP Jomo Fray on Emotion Informing Images & His Time with Project Involve
We here at Film Independent are excited about the new film Nickel Boys, and not just because it’s one of the most buzzed about movies of the fall. We have a special connection to the filmmaking team. Cinematographer Jomo Fray is a 2017 Project Involve Fellow.
He worked on the short film Emergency in his year as a cinematography fellow with producing fellow Joenique C. Rose. Joenique now works with us here at Film Independent, and we brought them together to talk about Nickel Boys and Jomo’s journey from Project Involve to where he is today.
Because it’s Thanksgiving week, we thought we’d give you a double serving and share with you this in-depth interview in two parts. Part one is below and look for part two later this week.
Okay, so first of all, I love Nickel Boys. I can’t wait to see it again in theaters. I did want to, of course, talk about the way that you and I met, which was a Film Independent Project Involve, and a now award-winning short, Emergency.
You were the cinematographer, and I was the producer. I always thought it was fascinating. And I don’t think I ever got an opportunity to really delve in with you about it.
But when you were speaking with Carey [Williams, director], initially, I think you sent him a sheet to fill out to really get inside of what it is he was visually trying to do. Could you talk a little bit about what that was, and have you evolved that method? Do you still use it?
Oh, that’s a great question. Yeah, I think when we were prepping that, I had sent Carey almost a script analysis sheet, like the way an actor might use to break down their character more formally.
I think that the sheet went into what was the spine of the character? What is their objective? What are the obstacles? What makes this day or set of days different than any other set of days in their life?
And yeah, initially just to try to build a vocabulary with the director that wasn’t necessarily aesthetic, but was more emotional, and more about the performances and more about the emotional story that they wanted to tell with the hope there that I would take that information, and then translate it over to maybe more visual modes.
I think that these days, I don’t use the sheet exactly, but I still use a lot of the techniques in that analysis. And I think that those are still fundamentally the questions that I ask, and the ways in which I think a lot of directors and I speak. I really love to build the visual language, organically from the soil level.
From the emotion and the drama and the performance, I like to build a camera language from that opposed to maybe coming to a project with aesthetic ideas first, where it’s like, oh, we should shoot this black and white, and I’m seeing it anamorphic. I usually like those ideas of how to visualize the script to come from deep discussions about the character and the emotion scene by scene. And then over the course of those scenes, try to either build visual rules or start to notice some patterns that I keep hearing them speak about in emotional terms.
And then it’s a question of, okay, if we want to feel like longing, well, here are some visual options with camera movement and lenses and camera system that might be able to evoke some of those ideas. Because for me, it’s about the image having a harmony with the drama and the story, rather than necessarily feeling like the images are being grafted onto this story. I really want those two things to really be in harmony.
I think we can see the time and effort that you do put throughout each of your different projects, because I feel like you have a visual language, you have a visual style, but of course, you’re working in collaboration with the director as well.
When it came to Selah and the Spades, and then All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, when you initially are given the script, or even if that’s the process of giving the script first, or if you knew the director, how did that relationship come together?
Is the way that you had engaged with those two directors similar? Did you change it up for Raven versus your Selah and the Spades director?
I think that as a cinematographer, I like to say that fundamentally, the core of my job is to be twofold, is to translate the mood, tone and emotions that a director is after. And secondly, to be the type of collaborator that allows my director to feel strong every day that they come to set. For that second portion, I always change up a bit of my style and my approach and my approach to the process of filmmaking and try to make that thing a very bespoke relationship that is more based on the director and how they like to work, how they like to feel prepared, and how they like to run their set.
In the case of someone like Tayarisha, the director of Selah and the Spades, and also The Young Wife, it’s for that Tayarisha and I’s process starts in a very similar way. We have a lot of conversations about the emotions and the performance and scene to scene, the almost a subtextual story we’re trying to tell to then find tools to grab onto that. But something that Tayarisha really likes to do is, she and I over the course of prepping usually like to find a phrase or a term that we’ll anchor as the rawest and most condensed version of what we’re after.
And so we’ll always just keep coming back to that word. So for Selah and the Spades, it was the term we had come up with was a term called ‘savage formalism’. And for us, that meant the Rihanna definition of savage in the sense, not an anthropological sense, but almost in the sense of being absolutely deadly and fierce and intense.
Combining that with the idea of formalism, formalism in terms of filmmaking, but also we were really inspired by Brutalist architecture of even though we were shooting a New England boarding school, we really wanted to bring the density and weight of a lot of Brutalist buildings and also the duality that is built into Brutalist history, which I think matched Selah as a character in the movie; this duality that she always had of her inner self and the self that she projected outside. So then for Tayarisha and I, every decision comes back to, okay, is this savage formalist? And for Young Wife, our second collaboration, the term was ‘acid expressionism’.
We wanted something that had a psychedelic feel, but was fundamentally expressionistic. It was allowing ourselves the room to make every image fully emotional based, fully expressionistic and connected to that character’s emotion. And again, we would choose the lenses, we’d have conversations with, okay.
The choices of the Cineovision lenses for Young Wife are deeply distorted anamorphic lenses, a lot of bowing, a lot of warping. And for us, that was all about having a capture mechanism that was expressionistic. It felt the way the character feels that their world was feeling distorted around them.
So again, that’s how we would take a term like ‘acid expressionism’ and try to manifest it into a real and practical choice. Whereas someone like Raven Jackson, who directed All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, again, it was that same emotional conversation of what were we trying to capture? And so for Raven, she had said really early on in the process that she wanted to capture the ineffable moments that make up a life.
It became a game of, okay, how do we capture images that feel bleeding and momentary, but beautiful, perhaps mundane, but still evocative and remembered? So towards that, we again started the conversation with what were the emotions that we wanted to visualize in the images? And what were the characters feeling?
Raven was and is a poet and was a poet before coming to filmmaking. She is so brilliant and has such a beautiful way with words.
For us, it was more question of, okay, well, we’ll shot list, we’ll prepare, but also let’s write a visual manifesto. Let’s write a set of 12 laws that we follow in the making of this movie. And every morning we would read those 12 pieces together, we would read those 12 manifesto points together, and we would get ready for our day as a way to reorient ourselves.
“How you design, how you make the movie, gets manifest inside of the movie.”
And I think for Raven, that was really helpful, because even though we had a really focused plan each day, I think it was important for her to feel like we could still be improvisational, we could still find things on set.
And the manifesto was a way to always ground that finding process, because it would always ground and anchor the image in a certain aesthetic, in a certain way, we would go about creating those things, which again, just made the entire process interpretive. And I think for Raven, that imbued every moment on set with a sense of wonderment, because it felt like we were finding something, not merely capturing something. So that was a way where the process was mutated a little bit to really meet both the director, but also the type of product the director was after making, because I really do believe that the process is the product with filmmaking. How you design, how you make the movie, gets manifest inside of the movie.
I want to see how you were brought in on Nickel Boys. I’ve heard RaMell Ross, the director, talk about being brought the book before it even was released and having conversations, with Plan B. And so I want to see where you stepped in on this journey
Yeah, I had watched Hale County This Morning, This Evening, RaMell’s first movie at Sundance the year it came out. And I distinctly remember sitting in the audience and as the lights came up and everyone stood up and filed out of the room, I just sat there. I sat there for 10 minutes.
I sat there when people came in to clear the theaters. I was just completely gobsmacked. Like, I don’t think I had quite seen a documentary like that before.
And there was a way in which I was just so impressed by how evocatively RaMell captured the black community of Hale County. There was just such a deep sensitivity to all of the images. They were just so striking to me.
I became obsessed with wanting to connect with RaMell in one way or another. A few years later, when the opportunity finally came in, when I heard he was working on Nickel Boys, I remember my agent sending me the treatment for it at 11.30 p.m., and 11:35 I called her and was like, we need to take this meeting. And she’s like, you haven’t read the script.And I was like, I don’t care!
RaMell is so interesting that I would jump into lava with him just to see what it would be like. We took the meeting and RaMell and I just really connected immediately in terms of thoughts around filmmaking and thoughts around the process of making images more generally.
And he was and is an image maker that I was profoundly influenced by his still photography work long before he and I met. There are ways in which I had used a lot of his images in different photographic treatments for other movies I had made. So there was a way in which it really felt like a returning to the source of like, okay, now I’m working with one of the people I have admired to try to build bespoke images together.
So that was like just such an exciting place to jump off from. And yeah, I feel grateful to have been brought in on it. I think it was an incredibly fun process for the two of us working together.
I was at the screening for Film Independent and heard RaMell talk a little bit about the process overall. This is his first fiction feature as a director. You could tell like he was excited. He enjoyed it. But also, he was learning and I think continuing to learn about the process that is Hollywood and making a feature like this.
But he did say when he was writing the story with Joslyn [Barnes, co-writer] that he already knew he wanted to tell it from the POV perspective.
It truly is an immersive experience. I remember you said that at the New York Film Festival at the Q&A. Him already knowing that this is the way visually he wanted to tell it, what was your process with him in making that come to life?
It was spectacular. It really came from a lot of conversations and a lot of testing. Because there was a way in which on our very first meeting, one of the very first things RaMell told me is that he wanted to shoot this movie Point of View.
And quickly into our conversations, we actually stopped using that term. We would use it so that crew members could understand what we were talking about. But really, when he and I were alone and we were talking, how we described the image is that it wasn’t a POV as much as it was what we call the ‘sentient image’.
It was an image that felt connected to a real body, a real body that had real stakes, and a body who was navigating a community in a system that was naturally hostile to their existence. We wanted the image to be immersive, to be inside of the scene and to even try to get rid of even the layer of dissociation that the audience is traditionally allowed to have with more traditional third person cinema. We wanted to invite the audience into the body of a young black boy navigating the Jim Crow South.
Towards that, it was really having questions, almost at a subatomic level, like a subatomic conversation about filmmaking, because it really became a question of, okay, if we’re shooting a sentient perspective, what’s an establishing shot? What’s a cut? What’s a transition? How do you move through space? How do you move through time? Is this a memory? Or is this real life that’s happening to a character and we’re just going between the moments that are most important to them?
And so towards that, it was RaMell and I quite literally having no less than 70 hours of conversation in prep, just the two of us just talking through what do these ideas mean? And how do we want to build even the edit from the shot listing phase?
How do we want these images to sit with one another? He and Jocelyn had done a massive amount of work, even by the time I had come on, sourcing a lot of the archival footage. Even reading the initial script, it had links to the archival in the script that you can look at.
And most of the archival that’s in the movie was called and found by them before we even started the process, which took a few years. So yeah, it really became a question of how do we take these traditional film ideas that are important and that do place us in a story, but also rework some of them for the sentient image and the POV perspective that RaMell was interested in.
We would be shotlisting and we designed every scene as a one-er, knowing that we would edit, but knowing that we also were asking the actors to invite in a level of artifice to their work.
And we wanted to have as little other artifice outside of the point of view that we could. So we wanted the scene to just flow as one and to not even be broken up by more traditional coverage. It was he and I needing to essentially test every beat out.
When we were shotlisting, we had a small DSLR with us and we would practice things like a hug and say, okay, how does this one? Like, oh, that doesn’t feel great. Well, maybe if we come a little higher and come down, it’s like, okay, that works a little bit better. Let’s keep playing with that.
So we would test it at that level while we were shot listing together. And our shot list was literally like 34 pages, single spaced, where every single scene was a single shot and every single shot was meticulously detailed.
And where does the gaze go? What does it see? In what order does it see it? How do we push into a space? How do we move? When do we invite seeing something else cross into the camera?
It was incredibly, incredibly detailed. One could sit down with the shotlist and reading the shotlist, you would just be essentially reading the movie fully visually. And the reason we approach it that way is that we wanted to have a meticulous level of preparation so that on the day and on set, we could have a little bit more of an improvisational approach to incorporate new things that we were seeing on set and new things that were interesting to us because we knew we had such a solid and rigid plan that we were going in with.
From there, it was camera testing and a lot of camera testing because we were trying to capture not sight, but more of what it feels like to see. It’s an uncanny thing because as viewers, we are the most visually literate to the idea of being inside our own bodies. Like this perspective is one that every human being fundamentally for the entirety of their life sits within. So it’s a funny thing where even sometimes a centimeter left or right can make an image go from being uncanny and uncomfortable to feeling somewhat natural.
Because we were after the feeling of sight and not just sight itself, if I was thinking about what would be a good camera system to reflect human vision, I might grab something like a Steadicam. Our brains naturally stabilize our motion and our movement. We don’t feel ourselves bounce through space when we’re moving through the world. Steadicam actually does match how we perceive the world.
But then because of the grammar of filmmaking, you put it up and it feels a little ghostly. It feels a little outside of the body. And because the idea of the sentient image, RaMell really wanted it to feel grounded in a real person, all of a sudden things like handheld is the perspective, even though that doesn’t reflect what it’s like to see, it just felt more real, more raw, more inside a body, more present tense.
And I think that that then became a real tool for us. But it’s also things like remote heads, things like dollies, using body rigs, using a Snorricam rig. In many cases, we had to engineer a lot of these systems for the specific shots or the specific trick shots we might have been trying to pull off to maintain a one-er in each scene.
It took me and the camera team having to unlearn everything that we know about camera systems to actually be willing to throw anything at the wall to test something out and see, does this feel like being inside a body? And we did those tests within prep. And then RaMell and I put it up in a theater at Color Collective with our colorist, Alex Bickel.
The three of us just sat in a theater watching all of these different camera movement tests, and then saying, does this feel emotional? Does this feel inside a body or does it not? And then essentially picking a lot of our camera systems from looking at the tests and asking ourselves, does this feel evocative? Does this feel like sight?
And so that was really how we designed a lot of the camera language and where we started in terms of trying to build a visual language and find the different camera systems we needed to get those scenes done.
***
In part two, we discuss how the look of Nickel Boys was achieved. Look for it later this week.
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FiSpo Update: A Paris Theater Reborn
Film Independent’s Fiscal Sponsorship program opens the door to nonprofit funding for independent filmmakers and media artists, in addition to organizations that support and celebrate independent film. That sponsorship can have a huge impact on the many films and film related projects, whether that’s getting them out the gate, or getting them over the finish line. FiSpo Updates, highlighting recent achievements of projects that are part of the program.
This month we have a special update from one of the great cinema cites, Paris, where Fiscal Sponsorship from some Hollywood heavyweights helped save a beloved cinéma.
La Clef Cinema was in trouble. The historic theater in the 5th Arrondissement had been fighting eviction since 2018. The theater was so beloved, that a collection of moviegoers and artists took direct action and on September 20, 2019 they occupied the cinema, and collectively didn’t leave. And while they were there, they didn’t just sit on their hands. The collective hosted screenings and talks with filmmakers like Fredrick Wiseman and Leos Carax. They were fined, sued, and through the legal battle won support of the public, as well as a few court cases.
That all came to an end on March 1st, 2022. The police came to evict the collective and the cinema was put up for sale. Through a Film Independent Fiscal Sponsorship, the La Clef collective raised $400,000 from over 5000 donors, including filmmakers like David Lynch and Celine Sciamma. Other donations then rolled in from Quentin Tarantino and others. With fiscal sponsorship and other fundraising like an art exhibit and loans from cooperative unions, they were able to buy the theater in June of this year.
We’ll let the La Clef collective take it from here as they give their project update below.
La Clef Cinema
Project Type: Theater Nonprofit
Project Status: Reopened & Renovating
Project Update: In June, we spent ten intense days refurbishing the whole building and organizing a lightening reopening festival to celebrate the purchase and thank the many supporters who made it possible. We held 30 screenings over four days, and have since we’ve closed down again for renovation. We need to bring the electrical networks up to code, remove asbestos from the building, and renovate the common areas to make them accessible – all of this construction work should take a year to complete, and is quite expensive.
We need to find $400,000 before April 2025 to fund the renovation work and to finally welcome the public back to La Clef! We are looking for dedicated patrons who share our conviction that the collective experience of movie-going needs community theaters like ours, and want to support our grassroots initiative.
Action item: The team at La Clef still needs funds to finish their renovations. Go to their page to donate today!
Film Independent’s Fiscal Sponsorship program opens the door to nonprofit funding for independent filmmakers and media artists. The projects and makers participating in the program express a uniqueness of vision, celebrate diversity and advance the craft of filmmaking through the creation of these special works. To see the full range of projects that are part of our program, visit our Sponsored Projects page.
To learn how Fiscal Sponsorship works, check out the below video or watch our full discussion with Film Independent’s Artist Development team way down at the bottom of this article.
If you’re already part of our Fiscal Sponsorship program and you have a production milestone you’d like to see in the next post, please email us.
For over 40 years, Film Independent has helped filmmakers get their projects made and seen. The nonprofit organization’s core mission is to champion creative independence in visual storytelling and support a community of artists who embody diversity, innovation and uniqueness of vision.
Film Independent Members watch nominees and vote for the winners of the Spirit Awards. To become a Member of Film Independent and make your vote count for next year’s 40th Annual Spirit Awards, just click here. To support our mission with a donation, click here.
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Festival Visions: How to Plan Out a Festival Run
The world of film festivals can be opaque. The amount of festivals to apply to is almost infinite, and it’s easy to feel lost when thinking of which to apply for, which to travel to and which to try and premiere at. There are so many resources on how to make a film, but hardly anything about getting a film seen.
Rudi Womack aims to fix that. He’s the Executive Director at the Wyoming International Film Festival and one of the festival’s senior programmers. On Reddit, he posted a seven-part deep dive going into many aspects of what it’s like to both submit and program for a film festival. We spoke with him about defining goals for your festival run, how to strategize what festivals to submit to, and what to do when you actually land.
So let’s say that I have a film and it’s a true indie. What am I going to look for when I’m applying to festivals and going on to places like Film Freeway?
So, before you even get into submitting the festivals, the question you should ask yourself is, what is my ultimate goal with the film? For some people, that goal might be, if they have a short film, they might want to get financing to create a feature. For some people, if they have a feature film, they might want to get distribution or a sales agent or something like that.
So, first, I would say, before you even look at film festivals, identify what your goal is with your film. Then the next step is, you start looking at film festivals that could help you with that goal. So, let’s use the example of trying to get financing to make a feature.
If you have a short, you’re trying to get financing to make a feature. I would be looking at festivals that have producers in attendance or financiers in attendance. I would be looking at festivals in your immediate region where you could do the work of getting financiers and producers in the door so they can see your work.
I would also be looking at festivals that have some kind of a track record of short films then proceeding on to turn into feature films, which is a little bit harder to track down. But if you really follow indie films quite a lot, you’ll be able to start identifying where those short versions of the features played at festivals. So, once you kind of have that pile of film festivals ready, I would then take it one step further and look at which of those festivals have programmed films similar in tone or genre or style to your film.
For instance, if you have a short documentary you’re trying to turn into a feature, you’re going to be looking to more documentary centric festivals. If you have a horror film, you’re going to be looking at festivals that program horror films or rom-com or comedy or whatever. So, from that initial pile of films, you’re able to kind of whittle it down just a little bit further and you’ll have festivals that can help you with your goal and festivals that have programmed films similar to yours.
From there, there’s various other things you can do to even narrow it down further, you know, budget, distance, region, what have you. But in general, those are the two biggest pieces of advice I would say. Identify what your goal is and identify which festivals can help you with that goal. And then from those festivals, identify which ones have programmed films similar to yours.
I love that. So, once the film is made, how should a team look at factoring a festival run into a marketing budget?
In my opinion, your festival funds should be planned out in pre-production. You should have a line item for it. I understand that it’s not always feasible for independent filmmakers, especially truly independent people who are either self-financing or even working off of grants or anything like that, which then gets back into what I was saying earlier about doing your research on festivals because then you can narrow it down so you’re not doing this giant blast out there into the world.
You’re being much more targeted about which festivals you are aiming for and that’s going to help you keep the prices down and that’s going to help you keep your odds up. And then the other thing that you can do is after you’ve done all that research, you can reach out to the festivals directly and tell them, hey, I’ve looked into you, this is what I like, my film would fit, you’ve programmed other films before that are similar to it, I would love to be there, here are my goals. If you can write some of these things in your cover letter, it will kind of separate you from the crowd that just kind of generally submits their film to a bunch of us.
So in terms of strategizing a festival run, there are so many festivals to chose to submit to. There are some that are more high profile than others. Do you recommend trying to go for more high profile out of the gate or trying to cast a wider net?
It entirely depends on A, how much money you have, B, what your strategy and ultimate goal with the film is. I feel like a lot of filmmakers fall into this trap where they make their short film, they submit it to Sundance and they submit it to all these super high profile film festivals that are very expensive to submit to. They’re also extremely competitive.
They get rejected from most, if not all of them, and then they become a little disenfranchised about either themselves, they’re like, oh, I’m not good enough, or they’ll be kind of angry with festivals, like, oh, they just rob us blind, take all of our money, and then they run with it. Instead, I would say, if you are going to be targeting high profile film festivals, you need to be more specific about which ones. If there are any high-profile film festivals in your region, for instance, academy qualifiers, if you’re in Georgia, Atlanta is a great one, because they’re going to have Atlanta-made films in a category for Atlanta-made films. The Florida Film Festival is an academy qualifier. Same thing, if you made a film in Florida or about Florida or something like that. I would say lean into any kind of demographic advantage that you have.
Either the film was made in a certain region, or you, the filmmaker, fit a certain demographic. There are African-American film festivals, there are Jewish film festivals, there are women film festivals. Any kind of advantage that you can give yourself on any of those key demographics is going to help you out.
I am a big champion of what I call a split strategy, and that is going for larger prestige festivals and understanding that you might be the small fish in a big pond at those, while also targeting more local and smaller festivals where you might be the big fish in a small pond, and using some of your success in those lower festivals to angle your way into some of the larger ones. Because a film that has done some amount of play in other festivals could potentially sway the opinion of a programmer at a larger festival.
Great advice. While I was reading your Reddit, one thing that surprised me was how strong you recommended applying to foreign festivals. Why do you see them as being such a good investment?
Two different reasons. One, sometimes what we take for granted is mundane, might be exotic somewhere else. I see this with the Wyoming International Film Festival all the time.
Our audience is very Wyoming-centered, and people might have the wrong impression that Wyoming people are only going to care about cowboy movies, when in reality, they love the foreign films that come because they don’t get to see these films ever. They’re not running through the cinemas, they’re not running through any of the main chains or anything like that. They don’t have access to these kinds of films.
Even on their Netflix or their Hulu or whatever, foreign films tend to be buried under the algorithm. So this is an opportunity for audiences to see something that they don’t get to see very often, and they also get to engage in different cultures and see a part of the world all through the medium of cinema. I feel that as Americans, we get a little too North American-centric, and we kind of ignore film festivals in other places in the world, when in reality, what we might consider is just kind of a run-of-the-mill film here could be something very out-of-the-box for an audience there.
And if you find success in a foreign film festival, you still get audience, you still get traction, you can still get press, and you can still angle all of these things to help you get into more local and regional films in the United States. So it’s never a bad thing to step outside of the box and try an audience that you wouldn’t necessarily think of right away.
When it comes to programming, what are some easy wins for a prospective filmmaker, and what are some red flags or things that might get a film put in the pass bin very quickly?
If we’re talking about films that get put in the pass bin very quickly, they tend to have a lot of technical difficulties. Lighting, acting, sound is such a big one. Sound kills films quicker than anything else, so I always recommend to filmmakers. It’s funny, you go onto Reddit, you go onto some of these forums, filmmakers are always talking about what new cameras and what new lenses and so on and so forth. I wish they would get that enthusiastic about sound, because audience will forgive bad cinematography, they’re not going to forgive bad sound. So those kind of technical bumps are what get things in immediate pass.
But let’s talk about things that get it into a deeper consideration from the programmers. One thing that I love to talk about, I’m an editor, I like to talk about making a film as concise and to the point as possible. Most people understand that as short. It’s a bit of semantics, I disagree. I don’t think short necessarily means better, but I think a more streamlined story means better. Often they go hand in hand, but not necessarily.
If you look at filmmakers like Terrence Malick, he makes films that are quite long, and some might say dry, but I would say each part of it is important, and it is saying a message. And I do think he’s very good at trimming a lot of fat, even though his films are pretty long. So for most filmmakers, a bit of general advice I would give is make your film as concise as possible, and make your story flow as efficiently as possible.
And that alone is going to set you apart from a lot of the other submissions that we get.
Now that I’m at a festival, what do you do once you’re there to get the most out of your time?
I could talk about this for an hour! Maximizing your film festival run. So let’s talk about micro, let’s talk about macro, because there is both. So micro is you are physically in the building at a film festival, you’re there, what do you do now?
The most important part of a film festival in today’s market for a filmmaker is networking, particularly lateral networking. It’s not sexy, it’s not fun, it’s not the Hollywood dream every filmmaker has of I’m going to go to a film festival, Steven Spielberg’s going to discover me, and I’ll be rich and famous. Lateral networking is meeting those other directors, cinematographers, editors, casting person, actors, whoever, that are kind of at your same level, gravitating with them, networking with them, and then moving on to create other films with them.
For me as an editor, I love film festivals because I’m swimming in a sea of directors and they all hate editing. It’s great for me for job prospects. In my opinion, if you’re at a film festival, the ways to maximize it are go to as many films as possible, speak with as many filmmakers as possible, get your card in front of as many filmmakers as possible, invite as many people to your screening.
If there are news or press, you can ask the film festival. Oftentimes they have a list of press that they work with. So speak to as much press as possible. Podcasts are huge and almost every city on earth has somebody doing some kind of a film podcast. So those are always great to go and talk with those people.
And go to every single networking event that you can. That’s parties, that’s tours, that’s whatever.
An odd piece of advice that I give filmmakers is try and build in some time where you can get away from the film festival. Go explore the city, go have an adventure, go meet the locals, go see what that city is about, what its personality is. That might inspire you for your next project or you might meet interesting people inside of the city that have nothing to do with filmmaking but they might have interesting stories. It’s one of the reasons I love going to film festivals. I get to travel so much and I get to meet so many people.
So that’s kind of a broad bullet-pointed micro view of what to do at a festival. For macro, I think scheduling which film festivals in what order that you want to play in can help you because that can help you start angling press. It can also start helping you build your audience and build a following for your film.
It also helps you with budgeting because budgeting is always a struggle for independent filmmakers and going to film festivals does cost a lot of money. But one of the most important things is audience feedback.
If you stack a couple of film festivals early on and then give yourself a bit of a break, you might find that with audience feedback you might want to re-edit or re-examine a part of your film, a scene, a character or something like that. You might hone it down a little bit more. If it’s comedy, are the jokes lame? If it’s a horror, are the audience responding? Are they scared when the bad guy comes out or whatever it is? If it’s a drama and you’re wanting to get tears at a certain moment and you don’t have those, is there any audience feedback that you can do to help you refine and hone your edit so it will have more success later on?
And then of course, looking at a macro festival run, any kind of press, any kind of reviews, any kind of audience review that you have of your film, share that with some of the other festivals. Show them that you are active, you are a participant in your own film and that you are going to do the hard work it takes to promote and constantly push your film.
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For over 40 years, Film Independent has helped filmmakers get their projects made and seen. The nonprofit organization’s core mission is to champion creative independence in visual storytelling and support a community of artists who embody diversity, innovation and uniqueness of vision.
Film Independent Members watch nominees and vote for the winners of the Spirit Awards. To become a Member of Film Independent and make your vote count for next year’s 40th Annual Spirit Awards, just click here. To support our mission with a donation, click here.