Now, three years later, the completed film is Peru’s submission for International Feature at the 97th Academy Awards. As part of TheWrap Screening Series, Tito Catacora spoke with us about the film, a black-and-white drama in the Aymara language about a 13-year-old girl, Yana-Wara, from a small indigenous community in Conduriri, El Collao, Puno, Peru. Her story was inspired by a young person Óscar and Tito Catacora had encountered in real life.

“We live in an Andean area where we saw this girl who was … being abused. She claimed that she could see evil spirits at night,” Catacora said in Spanish via an interpreter. From there, emerged a protagonist beset by tragedy: Yana-Wara lost her mother at birth and her father a few years later. (Spoilers ahead.) When she enrolls in her community’s local school under the encouragement of her loving grandfather Don Evaristo (played by Cecilio Quispe Charaja), her teacher rapes and impregnates her. She then begins to suffer from what her village believes to be possession by the evil spirit Anchanchu. The film is bookended by Don Evaristo standing trial for an excruciating decision he makes to save his granddaughter.

For Catacora, it was important that the film reflect the specificity of Aymara culture while also addressing more universal issues. The spirit world, for instance, is central to Aymara beliefs. While benign spirits, or deities, might be embodied in mountains, there are also evil ones, like Anchanchu, who lives in a cave and controls wealth. “On one side we deal with evil spirits, which is very different from what Christianity preaches, for example. We’re not talking about the devil, Satan or Lucifer, just evil spirits,” he said.

“On the other side, we’re incorporating other themes such as gender-based violence, where unfortunately women are the victims. But this has been happening throughout history, in every culture. And still happens. … We also deal with other subjects, like justice — ordinary and community justice — also medicine and in this case, Andean medicine. Every culture has their own particularities, but as human beings we also have the same problems.”

“Yana-Wara” was shot entirely on location in the mountainous Conduriri region, with a cast made up entirely of local non-actors, including Luz Diana Mamami, the extraordinary young woman who plays the title character.

“We couldn’t work with professional actors because they only speak English or Spanish,” Catacora said. So they embedded themselves in the Aymara community, where a field producer eventually found Mamami. “She was (interested in) the opportunity, so we immediately spoke with her parents,” the director said. “After this, we had to train the actors — we have double the work in that sense. We have to train them to act and to perform the specific roles of their characters.”

Early in the film, Don Evaristo tells his granddaughter that everything surrounding them is living: wind, rivers, caves, rocks, even houses. The movie’s lush cinematography and spare soundtrack (there is no music) reflects this philosophy, with the setting, an area about 4,500 meters above sea level known as the Enchanted City, very much brought to life.

“In our culture, the Andean (person), the Aymara (person), his knowledge is bidirectional, not like the western (person), who is unidirectional, meaning that they see, make a judgment and then declare, ‘It’s a being,’ ‘It’s a house,’ etc.,” Catacora said. “Not the Andean, they’re bidirectional. He sees something and does some introspection. He feels, sees things through emotion. That’s why for us the rivers are living beings. So I have to feel: ‘Is this river happy, sad or angry?’ A house for example, I can see a house and make the assessment, ‘The house is happy, sad… I wonder if it’s hungry or thirsty.’

“Those were my thoughts for this film,” he continued. “I don’t hear music or song in nature. I just wanted to interpret, to feel and to make the audience feel how the house of the Anchanchu feels — how that cave feels. That’s the atmosphere I wanted to convey.”

Watch the full discussion here.

The post ‘Yana-Wara’ Director on Violence, Nature and Spirits Both Good and Evil appeared first on TheWrap.

For the conversation, which followed a virtual showing of the film as part of TheWrap Screening Series, Verdin was joined by “Americans With No Address” narrator William Baldwin and featured talent Xander Berkeley. “Our goal with the film is to share our learnings with the audience because I learned more than I ever thought I would,” Verdin said. “I had no idea of the complexity of this problem. I hope that what we learned will be helpful to others.”

“Americans With No Address” is from Robert Craig Films and is a companion to the narrative feature “No Address,” which follows a group of characters who fall into homelessness. The feature-length doc, which was initially meant to be a short educational supplement to complement the narrative film, was born after producers visited 20 U.S. major cities over a three-week span for research. A wide range of people are featured in “Americans With No Address,” from individuals living on the streets to folks in organizations helping the homeless to government officials to health care workers.

Baldwin, who stars in “No Address,” credited nonprofit organizations and programs for doing “remarkable work” in shining a light on homelessness. “Where people have to get hip to and accepting is that the only way we’re going to resolve this is looking at it more as a mental health crisis rather than a homelessness crisis,” he said.

Berkeley, who co-stars in “No Address” and is featured in the doc, said it’s crucial for all sides of the political spectrum to band together to find common ground in order to “work together to find a solution.” Noting that “Americans With No Address” is meant to be a apolitical, Verdin added, “This crisis isn’t about politics.”

Deciding who to feature in the doc was challenging, she said, because “there were so many great stories.” She and the team interviewed “way more people than you see in the film.” One of them was a woman she hugged at a homeless shelter—which brought the woman to tears. “She said, ‘You’re the first person who’s treated me as a human being,'” Verdin said. “It’s very important that we remember that these are human beings out on our streets. Most of them didn’t get there by choice… and they need to be lifted up, given the tools of recovery and helped.”

“It’s about us coming together as a society and saying we have this problem. Billy’s very right in pointing out [that] this is a mental health crisis but it’s also a crisis of broken hearts, of people who, for various reasons, have but ended up there. We as a society need to come together and find solutions.”

The filmmaker, who calls herself “the perennial optimist,” also noted, “I’m a great believer in second chances.”

Watch the full interview here.

The post ‘Americans With No Address’ Team Hopes to Break Misconceptions About Homelessness appeared first on TheWrap.

But her wildest project yet might be “Triumph,” a dark comedy about psychics and space aliens in Bulgaria that is her home country’s selection for the Best International Feature Film Oscar this year.

Bakalova joined the film’s directors Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov to discuss the “crazy, unbelievable, but absolutely true” new film with Steve Pond as part of TheWrap Screening Series.

Set in the early 1990s, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, “Triumph” dramatizes a real-life attempt by the Bulgarian army to unearth an alien capsule from under a field, an artifact that will bring great virtue to the country’s government. And mankind. Bakalova plays a young woman who claims to have psychic abilities, which will assist in discovering the extraterrestrial goodies.

The actress said that the film’s plot, though set three decades ago and touched by the ludicrous, resonates within our world today.

“I’ve always been curious to find a reason why [psychic hotlines] are so strongly important for Bulgarian people, for people from Eastern Europe,” she said in the clip from the conversation (above).

She opined that the popularity of psychics, even among leaders and politicians, could be explained by centuries of disappointment with the status quo.

“When people have such a long history, you develop a mindset where you become more suspicious about how things are gonna turn,” she said. “So you try to find hope and something to hold onto. And even if that’s a psychic, even if that’s something that you can recognize as otherworldly, you want to find a hope in something. You want to believe in something.”

Noting that the movie features archival news footage of Bulgaria’s lurch back to Communism after the fall of the Soviet Union, she added, “When you’re scared of making a decision, when you’re scared to take a step further, take a leap of faith and believe in something new, you go back to old habits. Even [embracing] things that you wish to get rid of, just because it feels more secure and because you’re scared of what the future is going to give you.”

And this is where alien hunting by telepathic mediums suddenly strikes a chord. “That’s why having somebody like a psychic,” she said, “gives a reason why these people might go through some sort of a madness. And apparently, not only in my country. This is happening all over the world. I think that’s important to say, is that this is a story that makes sense far outside Bulgaria.”

Watch the full discussion here.

The post Maria Bakalova’s Sci-Fi Comedy ‘Triumph’ Tells the ‘Absolutely True Story’ of Psychics and Space Aliens appeared first on TheWrap.

Adapted for the big screen by Ross and co-screenwriter Joslyn Barnes, “Nickel Boys” tells the story of two teenagers — Elwood (Herisse) and Turner (Wilson) — living in Jim Crow-era Florida who become friends while enduring physical and psychological abuse as wards of a juvenile reform center called the Nickel Academy. The academy is a fictionalized version of the infamous Dozier School for Boys, which was run by the state of Florida from 1990 until 2011. Over years of investigations, forensics documented nearly 100 deaths at the school and discovered almost as many unmarked graves on its grounds.

The film’s ensemble cast also includes Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Daveed Diggs, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger and Jimmie Fails. Ethan Cole Sharp portrays young Elwood.

Finding two capable actors to lead the movie was a top priority for Ross and the creative team. The filmmaker detailed why Herisse, who previously starred in Netflix’s “When They See Us,” about the Central Park Five, and Wilson, whose past credits include “The Way Back,” were right for their parts.

“I see [Brandon] as a spiritual person who is really interested in feeling and experiencing the world, and that may not necessarily rhyme with who Turner is in Colson’s narrative,” Ross said, describing Wilson’s initial reading of the character as “perfect.” “He just read as an authentic Turner and everyone else [who auditioned] read as someone who was trying to be Turner.”

“[Ethan] has an optimism and a joy for life, and also a desire to be in communion,” the director noted. Herisse auditioned through a self-tape and was brought in late in the process, “which is, I want to say, the sad part because it would have been great to have him earlier because we moved on to other things to look at a million tapes. But I can’t imagine the film without these two.”

Making “Nickel Boys” required Herisse and Wilson to break the fourth wall and look into the camera lens, with Ross choosing to utilize a subjective, first-person point of view (first Elwood’s, then Turner’s) to chronicle the abuse the characters experience and witness. That meant Herisse and Wilson had to break typical acting conventions and recalibrate their approach.

“It was definitely a lot of unlearning during the process because it’s one of the first things you learn: You’re not supposed to look at this thing that’s kind of intruding in the scene and in the moment you’re having with your scene partner,” Herisse said. “But RaMell believed in what he was doing and he trusted us, and we felt that trust and that confidence in us very early on. So when it came to doing it, it was just about diving in and believing in him as well.”

Ross didn’t have macro discussions with the actors prior to filming about the “super high concepts of the film,” instead letting them organically discover it during the process of making it. “We weren’t like, ‘Okay, when you’re looking [at] the camera, you’re really looking at the audience.’ We didn’t ask very much because you guys came in so open and we didn’t need to over-explain or try to convince you all. You guys came to play, which made it fun because it felt like a genuine experiment.”

The stylistic choice of bringing the audience directly into the characters’ POVs drove home a larger thematic point for Ross. “Cinema hasn’t necessarily given that agency to people of color’s perspectives. We haven’t allowed for whatever that power is from the silver screen to be distinctly Black, for lack of a better word.

“It’s also distinctly universal,” he said. “If you don’t even know that Elwood is a person of color, I imagine every single one of you have at least vague memories or emotional impressions of being young looking up at towering figures who are your family members. We wanted to put the camera where the child would be and in that, provide the viewer access to the life gaze that Elwood had, which we hoped was an emotional connection to him and gave you a little peek as to how he saw the world, which was quite beautiful.”

One line of dialogue spoken by Ellis-Taylor’s character, Elwood’s grandmother Hattie, is directly lifted from Whitehead’s book: “Your portion is your pain.” It prophesizes the suffering that her grandson will endure as a young Black man living in the South of the early 1960s.

“We talk about the cards you were dealt in this situation, that you’ve been confined within,” Wilson said. “I think for myself, and to speak on Turner a little bit, there’s this idea of believing in the confinement which we’ve been put in. And Turner very much believed in the reality of his portion of the universe. This idea of being trapped, being an animal; he very much believed in these walls and that his portion of the cake was only pain.

“But within that, he had the intelligence and the wit in order to figure out how to make this piece of cake a little more colorful,” the actor continued. “In meeting Elwood, the relationship helps each other to recognize that they have more than just this piece of the world. They can break out of this confinement and that the world can be much bigger than these limiting beliefs that constantly are put upon and that we adopt as our own.”

Herisse credits Whitehead’s book and their adaptation for bringing awareness to crucial points in Black American history that deserve to be told, otherwise it could “easily be swept under the rug.”

“The way people have been experiencing this movie and talking to me, RaMell, Brandon, other members of the cast and crew, has brought about a bit of hope in humanity overall and the knowledge that people do care,” he said. “[I] can only hope that this movie continues to be watched by people that care and people are able to share with others, and hopefully lead to the change that we want to see, that we imagine.”

Watch the full discussion here.

“Nickel Boys” opens in theaters Dec. 13 in New York and Dec. 20 in Los Angeles.

The post RaMell Ross Broke Rules in ‘Nickel Boys’ to Give ‘Agency to People of Color’s Perspective’ appeared first on TheWrap.

The idea for “Queens” was borne out of a conversation Berlowitz had with NatGeo executive Janet Van Hissering, who suggested they explore females in the natural world as a full-fledged series. After discovering there hadn’t been a show that explored the matriarchal side of things (“Surprise, surprise,” Berlowitz said), it was full steam ahead.

“We thought, obviously, the time was right,” she said. The first task was to put together a “brilliant” female production team.

Enter Sarosh, who was on maternity leave when she got the call from Berlowitz. The “Queens” showrunner admitted she was reticent to come aboard due to her status as a new mother. “‘This is exactly why you’re going to do it,'” Sarosh recalled Berlowitz telling her.

“We literally had to rip up the rule book and find a completely different way to make a series like this,” she said. “This is revolutionary to make this series and it wasn’t always easy. But it was a hugely satisfying thing to do—in the office, on location, in post-production. Just phenomenal women and incredible men that supported us because there actually aren’t enough women to make a series like this. But hopefully, we are the first in a real change and we’ll leave a legacy.”

There’s a bit of history being made with “Queens” behind the camera. Musembi is the first Black Kenyan woman to direct and produce episodes of a major landmark series.

“It means everything,” Musembi said of her groundbreaking achievement. “When we talk about natural history, wildlife series or films, most of them are filmed in Africa. But the irony, up until a few years ago, is a lot of the people who make the series aren’t Africans. It blows your mind a little bit—like, why is that?

“When something’s made that way, it excludes the people who are living with the animals, the actual stakeholders. So to include black and brown voices in this, it has to happen. It’s the way forward and the world of the natural world needs it to happen.”

During the discussion, Darlington, who was responsible for framing the visuals on “Queens” as director of photography, also spoke about the lack of women in key roles such as cinematography and camera work. Kibby, who worked on the series’ arresting music score, praised Sarosh’s openness to be creative and different.

Because “Queens” is a docuseries about animals, which often has a very specific audience, it was vital that the creative team make it as accessible as possible. “We wanted it to be relatable,” Sarosh explained.

She added, “These are phenomenal, female, powerful stories and then they evolve and sometimes the characters inspire you to write. Other times you’re trying to weave (in) science in a way that feels entertaining and exciting. But we have always been unapologetically dramatic about these stories because they are. It’s not straight natural history, it’s a blended drama. It’s been incredibly fun and creatively freeing to do.”

Typical action sequences like big fights, big hunts and the flowing manes often seen in nature docs aren’t prevalent here. “It was a big risk for us to purposely turn away from the things that natural history usually does,” Sarosh said.

And also issues of consent. “It’s fundamental to a lot of the societies that we followed,” she noted. “But these queens are not all benevolent across the series. You will see some real characters and some pretty hardcore behavior as well. There are all types of female leader.” Berlowitz singled out the “badass, gangsta granny orca” as one of those characters on “Queens.”

As for the biggest challenge the team faced? It had nothing to do with being out in the field.

“It was the weight on our shoulders,” Sarosh said. “When we would got out about ‘Queens,’ there was very much a sense of, ‘Oh, that series the girls are making.’ But in that moment, we realized the weight of the fact that not only did we have to make something good, we had to make something great because everyone was waiting for us to fail across the board.”

“We’ve carried that weight for four years. We cannot tell you what a privilege it is to to see people’s reactions to these films,” she continued. “It may not be for everyone. We’ve all heaved that collective sigh when we realized it is good and people are enjoying it. Thank goodness because it was a risk, a huge risk.”

Berlowitz said they’d “like to” explore more matriarchal societies because there are “plenty more stories where these came from.”

“What’s really exciting is scientists are revising their thoughts,” she said. “They’re looking at classic patriarchal societies and going, ‘Maybe the females do have more power than we realize. We just haven’t been looking in the right way.'”

Watch the full discussion here.

The post How NatGeo’s ‘Queens’ Had to ‘Literally Rip Up the Rule Book’ appeared first on TheWrap.

Kemp Powers, one of the directors of “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse;” Nick Bruno, one of the directors of “Nimona;” Peter Sohn, the director of “Elemental;” Pablo Berger, director of “Robot Dreams;” and Toshio Suzuki, producer of “The Boy and the Heron” (and co-founder of Studio Ghibli) all spoke about the process of getting their films made – and the surprises along the way.

“So much of it has been getting to know the other filmmakers on this back end of the life of a film and it just feels like a privilege and an honor. And it’s also bittersweet. This is the end days of the journey of a film,” said Sohn about what it meant to get nominated. “And as lucky as I feel, I’m already holding tight to the hand of the film like, Oh, I’m going to miss you.”

Powers even gave a shout-out to some of the other terrific movies that weren’t nominated but were really, really special: “I love all of these films. I’m a huge fan. And there’s actually several other films that weren’t nominated that I love just as much. I love ‘Suzume’ so much, I love ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.’ There were so many great films that came out this year.”

Powers, who also co-directed the Oscar-winning “Soul,” also said, “I found myself emotionally connected to and moved and honestly dazzled by the array of different styles in the animated films. I love that none of our films look like one another at all. It’s so cool.”

Berger, who had made three live-action films before pivoting to animation with the charming, heartbreaking “Robot Dreams,” said that he met Guillermo del Toro at Annecy last year and that now he’s totally hooked. “Once you try it, you cannot take it away. I’m with you guys. I’m one of us,” Berger said. “I want to keep making animated films. It really opened my mind.”

You can watch the full Q&A with the nominees here.

The post TheWrap Screening Series: Best Animated Feature Nominees on Being ‘Dazzled by the Array of Different Styles’ | Video appeared first on TheWrap.

They included sibling pop duo Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell, previous Original Song winners and authors of the “Barbie” smash “What Was I Made For?”, Honorary Oscar recipient and legendary songwriter Diane Warren for her song “The Fire Inside” from “Flamin’ Hot,” and composers Scott George (nominated for his triumphant conclusion song “Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)” from “Killers of the Flower Moon), five-time Emmy winner Laura Karpman for her stirring score for “American Fiction,” and newcomer Jerskin Fendrix for his inventive compositions for “Poor Things.” The latter three are enjoying their first-ever Academy Award nominations.

As a 15-time Oscar nominee, Warren kicked off by remembering her love of movie music, particularly the title song from 1966’s “Born Free,” also an Oscar winner. “It just gutted me,” said Warren. “And there was “To Sir With Love” and “A Hard Day’s Night, and I was touched deeply as a viewer and listener. So I took a bunch of film classes, so I could just watch movies. I’d sit in the back working on my songs. And I think that by osmosis, that combination, kind of trained me in a weird way.”

Next up were Eilish and O’Connell, no strangers to the Oscars stage for their Academy-recognized Bond tune “No Time to Die” just three years ago. The former mentioned animated films such as “Over the Hedge” and “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron” as influences when she was young (remember, she’s only 22), and how she loved Thomas Newman’s “American Beauty” score. “I had the whole soundtrack downloaded before I ever saw it, ” said Eilish, “and I know that like the back of my hand and I think it’s so beautiful.”

O’Connell was very much in love with Howard Shore’s “The Lord of the Rings” scores and the Trent Reznor-Atticus Ross scores for films like “The Social Network” and “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” “They were super important and evocative to me and as I got a little older and started to like dabble in trying to record and make music, like seeing “The Social Network with that score was very inspiring from a kind of a standpoint of ‘like, ‘oh my God, that’s sort of the world that I like, that’s the music that I’m trying to make.”

George is brand-new to the film scene, and hails from the same Osage area that “Killers” is set in, as a longtime drummer and Native performer with various tribes and local companies. “Normally, using our music in film is sometimes out of context, you know, a score might be written or something, and they’re trying to capture some of the melodies and things like that in the score,” said George. “This is probably the first time I’ve seen it where it’s used to actually try to move the audience from one part of the movie.”

Karpman has won several Emmys for her TV compositions, especially for documentaries, and was best known as a Juilliard-trained jazz musician from her early days. “I really wanted to be a New York intellectual composer,” said Karpman, “And, you know, teach and do that kind of thing. But I got really turned on by this idea of how much music could move drama forward. And then when I wound up at Sundance, I saw that work together for the first time and then I was really committed to trying to see if I can make a life of this which I have.”

Fendrix is a British musician known for electro-pop style music with a Nick Cave-like singing style, and found himself drawn to music in TV shows such as “The Simpsons” and “Futurama,” which do not adhere to emotional rungs, and loves 1990s Disney films for their musical complexity. I really stuff like “Mulan” and “The Lion King” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” I think that’s extraordinarily high-level stuff, said Fendrix. “Like in “Mulan,” the balance between these kind of really jokey, New York cabaret kind of songs when it suddenly comes to this kind of really intense Shakuhachi kind of music. I’ve always been really drawn to those sorts of contrasts and how you express emotion musically, rather than just any one uncomplicated direction.”

You can watch the full conversation Q&A with the nominees here.

The post TheWrap Screening Series: Billie Eilish and Finneas Fell in Love With Movie Music Through ‘Social Network’ and ‘American Beauty’ | Video appeared first on TheWrap.

One of the topics of discussion was the challenges the filmmakers faced while making their docs. In the case of “The ABCs of Book Banning,” about the ongoing campaign by arch-conservatives to ban books in public schools and libraries, Adlesic said, “We’re getting all kinds of threats, like we’re pedophiles. We’re getting death threats for making the film because we’re standing against this injustice. I wish that the people banning books were as sophisticated and mature as the children in the film that you see.”

She added, “Grace is such a model of inspiration for so many of us. At 101, if she can stand up and say, ‘This is not acceptable’ and [show] what book banning can lead to for all of us, how could we not take the challenge and not take the risk of people, you know, attacking us and doing things to us?”

For “Island in Between” director S. Leo Chiang and producer Jean Tsien, one of the biggest challenges was finding an emotional entry point for viewers who might not be familiar with the islands of Kinmen, which are located between mainland China and Taiwan and are governed by Taiwan. Their solution was to lean into Chiang’s own personal history: He was born and raised in Taiwan, went to the U.S. as a teenager and later returned to his home country.

“In some ways, this film was a little bit of an existential crisis film for me,” Chiang said. “I’ve actually felt very distant from Taiwan for a long time, you know, sort of hearing stories from far away. But because the last few years, I’ve been back in Taiwan, it really kind of challenged my identity of me being Taiwanese.

“I think that maybe that’s one of the reasons why the film connected with audiences outside of the region,” he continued. “Because, really, it’s about a sense of belonging, the definition of home, which I think all of us can relate to. Doesn’t matter where we’re from and what language you speak.”

Here, he turned to fellow panelist Sean Wang, the director of “Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó” who is Taiwanese-American. Explaining that the nominations for his and Wang’s films have caused a stir in Taiwan, he said, “I actually want to shout out to Sean. The Taiwanese people are so thrilled. You cannot imagine the media madness that is happening now.”

Wang couldn’t have asked for a happier ending to his doc, which celebrates his two nonagenarian grandmothers and was born out of the rise in hate crimes against Asians during the pandemic. “It was that feeling of just wanting to remember them, honor them, help people who were only really seeing … elderly people in our communities as victims, [as] headlines of the anti-Asian hate crimes,” he said, adding that he wanted to “capture my grandmothers’ spirits in a way that was joyful and silly and infectious and youthful, but without ignoring the pain, the loneliness and the mortality that comes with old age as well.”

The filmmakers behind “The Last Repair Shop” and “The Barber of Little Rock” were similarly inspired by unsung heroes. “Repair Shop” tells the story of the craftspeople who restore the musical instruments provided to students in the Los Angeles public school system, and as Kris Bowers, who co-directed with Oscar winner Ben Proudfoot, noted, “Oftentimes [there are] incredible artists or stars that come out of a city, but we never know about the village that really made them possible. And so, I think for us, it was really about turning a spotlight on these people that work literally in the shadows.”

“The Barber of Little Rock,” meanwhile, focuses on Arlo Washington, who founded a nonprofit community bank in Arkansas to help close the racial wealth gap. Christine Turner, the film’s co-director with John Hoffman, recalled how she first heard of Washington. She remembered being told of the unique headquarters of his community development financial institution (CFDI): “‘There’s this guy named Arlo who has, in the parking lot of his barber college, a converted shipping container with a loan fund and you’ve got to meet him,'” Turner said. “And of course, sure enough, we did. And we knew right then and there, we had our subject.”

Later, she added, “He’s really a pillar in the community. And he’s a mentor to so many. So he gives anybody who comes up to him the time of day and he speaks with everyone and he listens to everyone. We were surprised by that. But that’s also why we were so drawn to what he’s doing.”

Washington, who was also on the panel, added that the film has “increased the demand for our products and services, how we help people. We’ve had more national attention. The CDFI industry is made up of about 1,500 CDFIs nationwide. And so the industry has really been intrigued with the fact that our film has gotten nominated for an Oscar,” he said.

“When I go in a grocery store now, it’s kind of like, ‘Hey! I saw you in a documentary!'” he said, laughing. “But we never did it for TV, we do it because we emerged out of unmet credit need, and it was what our community needed. And so I’ve always been solutions-driven. That’s why we put the shipping container on a parking lot because we just needed a place to make access to capital happen.”

You can watch the full conversation with the nominees here.

The post TheWrap Screening Series: Filmmakers Behind Oscar-Nominated Doc Shorts Praise Unsung Heroes | Video appeared first on TheWrap.

The film is inspired by a creation myth that posits that humans are but one small part of the natural world. “In this story, humans are not the crown of creation, they are just one of the created beings,” Gauder said during a recent discussion with Steve Pond and “Four Souls of Coyote” producer Réka Temple that was part of TheWrap’s Screening Series.

In richly colored animation, “Four Souls of Coyote” shows Native American protesters confronting the crew of an oil pipeline project that is being built near their ancestral land. From there, the story folds back into the ancient tale of the creation the universe. The message is simple: We must respect and protect the planet.

Gauder got the idea to bookend his movie with a protest set in the present day from the 2016-17 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which would run through the Standing Rock Indian Reservation on the border of North and South Dakota. “While we were working on a script, Standing Rock happened,” he said. “And I thought that this is not, you know, like an ancient story which has nothing to do with how we live now. But this still happening and what these people are protecting, there is water against oil, and they have a message we all have to understand. So that was a really big motivation to make this story.”

Temple, who described herself as a “hands-on producer,” said the process of making “Four Souls of Coyote” during Covid brought the film’s creative team closer together, despite the physical distance. “It was a special experience because everyone was locked down and we were connected via internet and via online Zoom meetings. And we really felt the connection,” she said. Temple estimated that the team was made up of approximately 150 people from Hungary, Italy, Germany and other parts of Europe. “We had 150 people — animators, artists — working on the film, starting from pre-production: character designing, background painting, coloring, animating.” It made for an intense collaboration. “We had a lot of emotions … and I think it really [is reflected] on what we see on screen.”

As Pond pointed out, Gauder’s feature isn’t the only film this year to engage with the idea of coyotes. In a key scene in “Flowers of the Killer Moon,” Lily Gladstone‘s character calls her future husband (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) a coyote — echoing the symbolism of the coyote as a trickster in Osage folklore.

In Gauder’s film, the animal’s role is slightly different. “I think coyote represents our subconscious mind or desire or bad side,” he said. “[It’s] the side we all have in us, but we don’t want to acknowledge or we want to push it down. But it’s there.” In his movie, the coyote stands in contrast to the character of the grandfather, who evokes the creation myth. “The old man is the other side, the aware, sober part of us and what we more relate to, but sometimes our motivations are coming from the coyote, which is living inside [us].”

Watch the full conversation with the “Four Souls of Coyote” filmmakers here.

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First on deck was director Thijs Bouman, whose 19-minute short “De Pinpas (The Debit Card)” chronicles a Polish au pair feeling entrusted with the debit card PIN code provided by the family who employs her. “Me and my screenwriter read an article which stated that there were a lot of Eastern European au pairs who have to do a lot of chores in the daily life in their work,” Bouman said. “They are being kept from their family, didn’t get to see their own family and getting paid really badly. We needed to get into the system and get into the lives of parents who leave their own children to take care of other people’s children.”

“Madeleine” director Raquel Sancinetti presented a heartfelt, partly animated 15-minute fantasia about aging, in which a 107-year-old attempts a trip to the sea with her much younger friend 67 years her junior. “I started this project five years ago,” said Sancinetti, who bonded with a homebound older woman she met through an aquatic fitness class named Madeleine. “After the class, I went to meet Madeleine at her home, and it was love at first sight, we connected and bonded right away. I visited her for five years, every week, once or twice a week. And I knew that she wouldn’t leave the house. The only way I could [tell this story] was through the animation.”

“Neighbour Abdi,” a short by Douwe Dijkstra, is a bold, 29-minute exploration of a Somalian furniture designer re-enacting his life (complete with horrific war imagery) via green screens and visual effects with the help of filmmaker Dijkstra, his neighbor. “The project started in this space where I’m sitting now,” Dijkstra said. “Once he learned that I was a filmmaker he kept saying, ‘You should make a film about my life!’ Tha was his very clear request. And when I got to know him a bit better, I thought it was actually a really, really good idea because there was an amazing story standing on my doorstep.”

Last up was John Hoffman and Christine Turner’s “The Barber of Little Rock,” a sobering look at the effects of societal racism and scraping by, as seen through the eyes of subject Arlo Washington, a Black barber who becomes an Arkansas hero when he creates a landmark, singular community bank that actually transforms the lives of his town’s residents.

“There’s tremendous wealth inequality that we see in this country today between black communities and white communities,” Turner said. “And we show this through the story of Arlo, who runs a barber college actually, that’s an important place in the community for many people. But he also runs a loan fund, something we call a community development financial institution, and through this loan fund, which began in a shipping container on the parking lot of his barber college, he’s able to provide funds to people who may otherwise not qualify for a traditional loan.”

Watch the full conversation with all of the shorts filmmakers here.

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