Sundance Ones to Watch: Cinematographers
Five cinematographers on the vision for their Sundance films
We’ve been covering the 2025 Sundance Film Festival with pieces on Debut Directors, Editors, World Doc picks and Memorable Moments, plus Instagram takeovers from the film teams of The Dating Game; Prime Minister; Coexistence, My Ass!; and Heightened Scrutiny and Folktales.
Next we focus on cinematographers with docs playing across the Competition and Premieres sections:
Folktales directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, director of photography: Lars Erlend Tubaas Øymo, cinematography by Tor Edvin Eliassen
The Dating Game directed by Violet Du Feng, cinematography by Wei Gao
Cutting Through Rocks directed by Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni, cinematography Mohammadreza Eyni
Come See Me in the Good Light directed by Ryan White, cinematography by Brandon Somerholder
On the precipice of adulthood, teenagers converge at a traditional folk high school in Arctic Norway. Dropped at the edge of the world, they must rely on only themselves, one another, and a loyal pack of sled dogs as they all grow in unexpected directions.
My approach to shooting this film:
As the DP of the film, I worked together with the directors in pre-production to set a visual framework for the film. It was important for me to create a visual language that reflected our characters personal and intimate meeting with the wild and untamed nature of Finnmark, northern Norway, while at the same time allowing them to breath and be fully present in their experience of this formative year. When we started shooting, I was lucky to be joined by cinematographer Tor Edvin Eliassen, who turned out to be the perfect addition to our team. The Folk high school is an inner journey for each of the students, and with the use of long lenses, we found the right amount of intimacy and distance needed to capture beautiful scenes. It allowed us to give our characters their needed space, while still being able to isolate and enable us to reflect upon each characters subjective experience of this place. As the year passed by in this arctic wonderland, it was impossible to ignore the magic created by darkness, campfires and northern lights. It was important for the directors to explore how nature and animals impacts our imagination and shapes us as human beings. And through that a magical layer appeared, allowing us to draw inspiration from norse mythology and nature itself.
The scene I'm most proud of:
I personally love the scene with Hege and her final goodbye to her favourite dog Sautso. Especially the final image of the scene, symbolizing Sautso passing. It was a shot where I immediately felt the magic and its significance for the film. But I think the most difficult scene to shoot, were I felt that our technical choices and our visual ambitions aligned, was the students solo night experience. The students are left to tend to themselves, and set up camp in the wilderness, in -20 degrees celsius. We wanted to respect and emphasize our characters experience of being alone and left to themselves, so we decided to shoot everything with a 200-600mm lens on a tripod. This meant carrying and setting up camera, in the dark, in powdered snow. Even though exhausting, it turned out to be a really good choice, allowing us to be up close, without being in the way, and be closer to our characters subjective experience of overcoming their hardships.
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