At Sundance, pandemic dramas unfold on screen and off
Peter Nicks had for months been documenting the students of Oakland High School, in California, when the pandemic hit.
“It’s in the Bay,” says one student of the virus as he and others mill together in a classroom, excitedly contemplating the cancellation of school.
Soon, the principal is heard over the loudspeaker — an announcement that would signal not just the scuttling of prom and graduation ceremonies, but, potentially, Nicks’ film. After chronicling other Oakland institutions, Nicks had set out to document a year in the life of the multicultural teenagers of Oakland. “Something like ‘The Breakfast Club’ with kids of color,” he says.
But how do you make an intimate, observation documentary about school life when the hallways are suddenly emptied, the school musical canceled and your third act turns virtual?
“The first order of business was just capturing that moment,” Nicks says, speaking by Zoom from Oakland. “Then shortly after that it was: What are we going to do? How are we possibly going to finish this movie?”
“Homeroom,” Nicks’ fittingly titled — and ultimately completed — documentary, is one of the 74 feature films debuting at this year’s reimaged Sundance Film Festival, which opened Thursday. The pandemic has transformed the annual Park City, Utah, festival into a largely virtual event, but it has also reshaped many of the films that will unspool there.
No festival more represents an annual cinematic rebirth — a fresh crop, a new wave — than Sundance. But given the constraints on gatherings since last March, how could filmmakers get their movies made, edited and delivered to Sundance?
The majority of films showing this year were shot before the arrival of COVID-19 — many of them edited during quarantine. But there are numerous filmmakers at the festival who managed the seemingly impossible
feat of making a movie in 2020.
A handful of high-profile films made during the pandemic have recently hit streaming platforms, including the heist comedy “Locked Down” and the romance “Malcolm & Marie.” But Sundance will supply the fullest look yet of moviemaking under the pandemic. Even in an independent film world predicated on a can-do spirit, the results — including “Homeroom,” “How It Ends” and “In the Same Breath” — are often striking for their resourcefulness.
Sundance’s slate is down from the usual 120 features, but it’s not for lack of submissions. More than 3,500 feature films were sent in. Some were made in a pandemic sprint.
British filmmaker Ben Wheatley made “In the Earth,” a horror film set in the pandemic,
over the summer. Carlson Young shot her fantasy-horror thriller “The Blazing World” with a skeletal crew last August in Texas, with the cast quarantining together at a wedding resort. Most films made in 2020 are time capsules but that’s explicitly the purpose of Kevin Macdonald’s “Life in a Day 2020.” It’s composed of 15,000 hours of YouTube footage shot worldwide in a single day.
Nanfu Wang, the China-born documentarian based in New Jersey whose Sundance prize-winning 2019 documentary “One Child Nation” analyzed the personal and widespread toll of China’s one-child policy, didn’t realize she was starting a film when she did. At first, she just kept taking screen shots and recording social-media posts she saw coming out of China in January.