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The Fujairah-born director is passionate about the Emirates and its people — and she tackles a number of important social themes in her new film about a boy with autism

The fourth annual Gulf Cinema Festival is currently taking place in Riyadh this week, shining a spotlight on regional filmmaking talent. The four-day event, running from April 14 – 18, aims to foster cultural and knowledge exchange amongst attendees and promote the growth and development of regional cinema on to a global sphere.

The festival features an immersive lineup of specialised training workshops and dialogue sessions covering a broad range of filmmaking topics.

The event will also be showcasing 29 films – including feature films, short films, and documentaries – by renowned filmmakers from across the Gulf.

One of the films, titled Mountain Boy, will be premiering at the festival today. The film was directed by Emirati filmmaker, Zainab Shaheen, and was produced by Desert Rose Films, a female-focused production company in Abu Dhabi.

Former creative producer Brendan Sweeney will commence duties as the new CEO of Filmmakers Academy (FA) on April 15.

Sweeney joined the Los Angeles based Filmmakers Academy, a premium educational platform for filmmakers by filmmakers, in 2016 as a co-founder Shane Hurlbut, ASC’s personal assistant.

“Brendan is a passionate producer and director with an extensive background in the technical fields of filmmaking, directing and cinematography,” says former FA CEO Lydia Hurlbut. “For the past two years he has streamlined the company’s production workflow and elevated the business into its position as a leader in online education for filmmakers.”

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire has a visual style reminiscent of the iconic 1984 film, a palette cinematographer Eric Steelberg (Ahsoka, Hawkeye) intentionally crafted for this story that sees characters new and old strap on a proton pack to bust a chilling demon terrorizing their city. “We wanted to capture the texture, color, and grit of the original movie so nothing seemed too new,” Steelberg tells The Credits about creating the look that artfully blends rich hues and deep blacks for a heightened, naturalistic appeal.

“Música”
Dir: Rudy Mancuso DP: Shane Hurlbut
Category: Narrative Spotlight
Format: 5K RED R3D
Camera: RED GEMINI, KOMODO, Insta360 & GoPro Hero 10 Black
Lenses: Leica Summicron C’s

“Barbie” and “Ahsoka” received top honors at the 61st annual International Cinematographers Guild (ICG) Publicists Awards luncheon at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel on Friday.

The awards honor individual publicists and unit still photographers who further publicity campaigns for film,TV and entertainment journalists.

Warwick Thornton’s cinematography on The New Boy has seen him pick up another international accolade, this time the Spotlight prize at the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) Awards.

First awarded in 2014, the ASC Spotlight Award was created to recognise cinematography in smaller, independent and arthouse feature films. ASC cinematographers may submit one film that is not their own for consideration for the award, with Thornton nominated against Eric Branco for Story Ave. and Krum Rodriguez for Citizen Saint.

“Without a doubt, the biggest creative challenge was filming this movie on stages and sets in London, trying to make it look like New York,” begins Steelberg. “We knew it was time to bring the Ghostbusters back to their hometown, but the scale and scope of the movie required production to look elsewhere for principal photography, with a smaller second unit handling exteriors in New York.” Blending those two places, matching the light and feel an ocean apart, was something that he had never attempted before.

Michael Balfry, the director of photography for Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender, revealed that firebenders were the most difficult type of bender for the show to bring to life.

Oppenheimer took the marquee Best Edited Feature Film (Dramatic) honor and The Holdovers landed the top Best Edited Feature Film (Comedy) award at the 74th ACE Eddie Awards Sunday. Hosted by Nina West, the winners were announced live in a ceremony at UCLA’s Royce Hall.

Come on board and bring along all your hopes and dreams! The journey that Monkey D. Luffy (Iñaki Godoy) and his band of fellow misfit pirates experience was another journey to create. No one knows that better than cinematographer Nicole Hirsch Whitaker, ASC who stopped by Filmmakers Academy to share her experience on the One Piece Netflix adaptation.

In creating the lifting sequence that reconnects them, cinematographer Matthew Libatique lit the location knowing “the music was going to power the performance.” “From a lighting standpoint we made sure we could move the camera through the space without being too precious where the light was,” he says.

In the official live demonstration of the Sony Burano 8K Digital Cinema Camera, Shane Hurlbut ASC will unveil the new compact full-frame camera system and its versatile features at Sony Studios. The Filmmakers Academy mentors presenting alongside Shane include Derek Johnson (DIT/colourist), Jason Robbins (A-Camera gimbal operator), and Thomas Popp (sound mixer).

Shane will begin with a comprehensive overview of the Burano’s technical specifications and its key components that any cinematographer and their camera team will want to consider.

"Reservation Dogs" and "Saltburn" also took home trophies at the 28th ADG Awards ceremony, hosted by Max Greenfield.

Production design Oscar nominees “Barbie,” “Poor Things,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Oppenheimer,” “Napoleon” all competed for the 28th Art Directors Guild Awards February 10 at Ovation Hollywood’s Ray Dolby Ballroom. “Poor Things” prevailed over “Barbie” for fantasy, and is now in the driver’s seat to win the Oscar. Throughout the season, it has been a race between these two big feminist films constructed around rebirth and unconventional world-building.

“If you can pick your team you truly trust in, you can easily allow everyone to do their job.”

At No Film School, we enjoy geeking out on the hard skills and soft skills required to be successful in this industry. For example, we enjoy the technical talk of cinematography. We also like diving into things like leadership skills, collaboration decisions, and how to hire or fire. These are some of the things we discuss with a roundtable of cinematographers whose films premiered at Sundance and Slamdance this year.

The diversity of cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister’s output makes it difficult to typecast him. The German DP won an Emmy for his work on a BBC version of Great Expectations and followed with the Rowan Atkinson spy spoof Johnny English Strikes Again. Then, in succession, he lensed the Scott Cooper horror flick Antlers, the Apple prestige drama Pachinko and Todd Field’s Tár, picking up an Oscar nomination for the latter.

But with True Detective: Night Country, Hoffmeister returns to a previous specialty–unsettling subzero horror.

Filmmaker Eric Branco, best known for his work as a cinematographer on films like Clemency and The 40-Year-Old Version, has signed on to make his feature directorial debut with the drama Silent Partner for Black Man Films

Celebrating its world premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Stress Positions is a chaotic film starring John Early and directed by Theda Hammel. Taking place in New York in early 2020, I was immediately taken by the look of the film and how well it captured that specific moment in time. Below, you’ll find a transcribed conversation with Director of Photography Arlene Muller in which we break down her approach to the film. We also discuss music videos, Early as a comedic legend, and the interesting challenge of not only shooting in a New York brownstone, but adding hurdles via shooting through environmental obstacles. Check out the conversation, and be sure to check out Stress Positions!

Each summer, the sisters at the center of Alessandra Lacorazza’s Sundance 2024 premiere In the Summers visit their father in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The film spans several formative years of the sisters’ lives, and their father sometimes struggles to keep pace.

Below, cinematographer Alejandro Mejia, whose recent credits include Stolen Youth, discusses shooting the film, including how his love of photography books helped inform the film’s look.

Sundance cinematographers break down the cameras, lenses, and looks of the scripted feature films premiering at the 2024 festival.

Every year, IndieWire reaches out to the cinematographers behind the films premiering at the Sundance Film Festival and asks which cameras, lenses, and formats they used and why they chose them to create the looks and meet the production demands of their films. While budget is always a concern — and certainly was mentioned by several filmmakers who responded to our survey — it’s amazing to see just how many ways cinematographers can create wildly different visual and emotional landscapes.

Could you first tell us a little bit about what your job as a cinematographer entails and what projects you’ve worked on in the past?

The job of a cinematographer, if you distill it down to the most basic form, my job is to translate the director’s vision of a story. My job is to make sure that we are telling the story visually the way that the director wants it told or the way the director sees it.

I shot the “13th,” which is a documentary by Ava DuVernay. I also was part of a series called “Y: The Last Man” that was based on a comic and a graphic novel that I absolutely loved. I’ve done a lot of television along the way that has been a fun, definitely a different way of storytelling, which was really exciting.