At this years Sundance Film Festival, Immersive Media hosted our inaugural panel discussion with five innovative cinematographers who had films screening at the festival: Martim Vian—Love Brooklyn, Marcus Patterson—Sunfish (& Other Stories On Green Lake), Christopher Aoun—All That’s Left Of You, Matthew Chuang—Jimpa, and Ethan Palmer—Plainclothes. It was a lively and interesting discussion about the current state of indie cinema, cinematography, and more. It has been edited for clarity and length.
Eric Green: How did you get into cinematography? How’d you get your start and what were the passions that led you here?
Martim Vian: I wanted to be an animator as a kid. I thought I would end up at Disney. I always knew that I wanted to work in film. I applied to the National Film School in Portugal, not knowing what a cinematographer was or that they existed.
I thought the director was the person who touched the camera because the pictures are always of directors behind cameras. I went to film school and I discovered that the people who made the images were the cinematographers, and I fell in love with it. I knew that that’s what I wanted to do.
Marcus Patterson: I acted in high school then I was a writer when I was in high school. When I was an undergrad I loved editing and there was a time when I thought I was gonna be a trailer editor. I always thought it was amazing the way you could take a two-hour story and turn it into two and a half minutes. It is phenomenal and compelling. I think it’s amazing.
I edited a documentary and I learned quickly. I just can’t be in a room in one spot forever professionally. I bought a camera, shot some movies, and a couple of those won student film festivals, which was huge for us at the time. That was when I learned that I love shooting.
Christopher Aoun: I grew up in Lebanon. My father was a photographer. There’s something I love about moving images more. I decided to study cinematography to be able to dive into moments. I started doing documentaries to deal with images differently. I love the fact that they would transport me somewhere.
Eric Green: I love how immediate documentaries are.
Matthew Chuang: My parents moved us from Taiwan to Australia when I was three. My parents wanted me to go into a respectful job but I didn’t get the marks to do that. I was just focused on watching movies. My dad said, “You love movies so much, why don’t you try and do movies?” I went to film school in Sydney, and I enjoyed it. Visual language is something that I’ve kind of naturally found myself drawn towards.
Ethan Palmer: I come from a family of artists, painters, and sculptors. I grew up with visual art all around me but I never could draw. I found still photography first. Then I went to two years of film school and then dropped out and finished with a liberal arts degree in film studies. Kind of like a mashup. I was in New York and found friends to make stuff with. We made a little production company and started, started shooting documentaries, and just had like a great little team to do it with.
Eric Green: Let’s talk about your films that are at Sundance. Let’s start with you Ethan, you shot Plainclothes… This takes place in 1997, how did that inform your camera choices?
Ethan Palmer: We shot a whole kind of texture pass with a video camera. From the beginning that going to be part of the language. That’s a big part of the film and it speaks to sort of the fractured mental state of the main character and kind of feeds into the changing technology of the nineties.
Eric Green: Like the look of The Celebration from ’97?
Ethan Palmer: I love those early Dogme 95 films. That’s one of my favorites but was not in my head for this one. Carmen Emmi, the director had a Hi8 camera and he was already starting to shoot stuff.
That camera became a big part of the look of the film. I noticed that he was zooming a lot, really extreme zooms super close up. I also started to think about shooting in 16mm format. We didn’t have an opportunity to shoot film, but I did do a crop sensor on the Alexa 35, so I could get the range of 16mm zooms.
Marcus Patterson: How did you determine what you shot on the Hi8 versus what you shot on the 35?
Ethan Palmer: We did most of the movie on the 35, and then there would be certain scenes that Carmen wanted to do a take with the Hi8. There are places in the film where it cuts from the Alexa 35 straight to the Hi8 take and it almost perfectly matches.
Martim Vian: Did you grade them differently?
Ethan Palmer: We didn’t touch the Hi8.
Eric Green: Matthew, tell us about Jimpa.
Matthew Chuang: Jimpa is loosely based on director Sophie Hyde’s own life story.
When she was born her father came out as gay, her parents decided to stay together to raise her while her mother was having other relationships. When she turned 13, he moved to Amsterdam because he hit a ceiling here with his work.
When Sophie grew up, she became a filmmaker and she had a kid who has come out as non-binary trans and when that kid was 13, Sophie’s father passed away. So this film is her imagining what would be like if her father was still alive and the kid could have conversations with him.
Eric Green: Does it all take place in the present?
Matthew Chuang: It takes place in the present, but throughout there are a lot of flashbacks, which are single frames dropped in throughout the scene. It was like trying to find one frame that captured the experience of whichever character we were focused on. It’s like one frame that kind of captures what they’ve experienced and how it shapes them in their current present time.
Eric Green: Christopher, tell us about All That’s Left of You.
Christopher Aoun: We have four different periods, which are 1948, 1978, 1988, and 2022. The film starts with the grandfather in Palestine in 1948, right before the creation of Israel. And then the family has to leave their house, and we follow them until they get into a refugee camp.
Then we jump into a new time, which is 1978. That refugee camp became a small village. And then to 1988 following the son and father and son relationship. There is a tragedy… Then we fast forward to 2022 and then something else happens. It was present day in the beginning, and after 2023, we decided to have it just end before 2023.
Eric Green: I’m very fascinated with time periods. What was the approach to shooting? Did you shoot in different formats or was the lighting, how did you treat the different years…
Christopher Aoun: We decided to just shoot everything with the same lenses and same camera, and not switch. Just to make it feel like all the generations are one life, to feel that it’s all connected. What we did was different was the camera movements. They were very different between the times. The way the camera interacts with actors is different.
Eric Green: So it’s stripped down and more about the emotional core of what’s happening. There are no wrong choices. Everyone has their way of doing things. If it’s done well, that’s where the magic happens. Marcus…
Marcus Patterson: Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake). It’s four different chapters of the lives of different people in Green Lake, Michigan. It’s where the director Sierra Falconer grew up and her grandparents owned this cabin on the lake. She was fascinated by the way that time exists in a weird dimension by the lake when people go to the lake and spend time there. I had a similar place in my childhood.
One of our stories has a fish that allegedly is the size of a whale. People sit around and talk about this legendary fish and embellish, and then the next person embellishes. So we were captivated by the way this world sort of existed separate from the rest of the rest of the universe. The stories sort of reference each other loosely, but they’re not related at all. The only thing that they have in common is this magical place in Michigan.
Eric Green: Love, Brooklyn…
Martim Vian: Love, Brooklyn is the story of three adults in Brooklyn. It’s an adult coming-of-age story with three characters who are dealing with things that keep you stuck in life.
Eric Green: The fork in the road where you’re old enough, but you have to choose to be a mature adult.
Martim Vian: Do you stay in the comfort of your past, the life you already lived and know, or do you try something you haven’t? It’s a character piece. They’re dealing with their relationships.
The director Rachael Holder is from Brooklyn, so it was really important for her that Brooklyn was depicted how she knows it. She loves Brooklyn. It has a cinematic quality to it. We knew there had to be some beauty to it but we weren’t trying to purify it.
Eric Green: I keep hearing she and her as the directors. How many of you work with female directors? We’ve come a long way. So any thoughts on this?
Christopher Aoun: I’ve worked on almost every film with a female director, except for two. It’s been a completely different approach where I feel that women want to dive into in depth into psychology of what every sentence means to them.
Martim Vian: Some people are storytellers regardless of where they come from who they are or what their origin is. The more I work with female directors, the more I think about all the female directors who never were, I feel like so many stories weren’t told, not just in film, but in art in general.
Marcus Patterson: As an artist, I want to tell different stories. The cool thing that we get to do is dive into different people’s stories. I’m not interested in doing the same thing with the same types of people over and over again. My biggest fear is probably not failure, it’s getting pigeonholed into one type of project.
Matthew Chuang: I think what’s interesting is when a project comes you get to decide, should I be part of this project… could I learn something from the filmmakers involved? Is there a point of view that I can learn about and through that process, work with all these different filmmakers, then I can become a better filmmaker by understanding, listening, and feeling what they go through.
Eric Green: That’s a great point. I want to learn stuff. I want to see multiple points of view. It’s nice when you can learn perspective. Listening to the stories of your films, I feel like there’s a rich tapestry there. I love how different all of these films are. We are getting close to the end here and I’d like to talk about the festival itself. What has your Sundance experience been like?
Ethan Palmer: The Sundance experience. This is my second time here and it still has that unique kind of energy, that collective filmmaking focus that comes here. The amount of kind of eyeballs… I think we’re learning what this new attention economy is.
Marcus Patterson: Sunfish (& Other Stories On Green Lake) is a true indie. There’s no financier behind it other than the director and the producer. The money was raised from local Michigan businesses and family and some grants.
To have everyone’s work honored like this, I was so emotional yesterday. I knew what premiering at Sundance meant. It’s taken my breath away, the response to the film. The community opportunities here are amazing.
Eric Green: One of my favorite aspects of my time in Park City has been the great conversations I have had the whole time with filmmakers, students, volunteers, everyone.
The Sundance Film Festival Will Return in 2026.
