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Hi y’all. Welcome back to Top of the Line, your friendly summary of the doings by IndieWire’s Craft team. This week and last have been largely taken up with Sundance across the site. It’s IndieWire’s 30th anniversary at Sundance, in fact — a milestone I have been told I cannot compare to how old I am, or the executive editing team will ensure I end up alone inside of a “Melania” screening that I never, ever leave, if you know what I mean.
Most of what I have been doing for our Sundance coverage has been the annual camera surveys we send out to cinematographers with features playing at both the fiction and non-fiction sides of the festival. It’s always a bear to put together and format, but it’s a lot of fun to read. It’s a great resource for when the big festival hits pick up their distribution deals, of course. But it’s also just wild to read through and see the different reasons that both “Josephine” and “Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant” decided to work with the ALEXA 35.
I’ve also been struck all week by something that Adam Khalil, one of the directors and DPs behind “Aanikoobijigan,” wrote in his survey response. “We often think about something Dara Birnbaum once said about her early video practice in the 1970s, that she and her friends would pass a camera around like a joint. That image stuck with us. Over eight years, the film moved through different hands, technologies, and ways of seeing, driven by a shared commitment to help bring Ancestors home and to make visible the labor required to do so. In the end, what mattered was not the camera or who was holding it, but the collective responsibility to carry those stories forward, together, across time, and in relation,” Khalil said.
As I think not just about film in 2026, but about a lot of things, it’s that taking on of shared commitments and embracing new/old/remembered forms of collaboration that is giving me a bit of hope.
‘The Housemaid‘ ©Lions Gate/Courtesy Everett CollectionMeanwhile, there’s some great stuff around the site. Chris O’Falt, who was on the ground at Park City one last time, has a great interview with the team behind “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” and some very interesting thoughts about what Sundance will look like when it takes up its new residence in Boulder. Meanwhile, Jim has an absolutely fascinating piece about finding the exact rich level of WASP creepiness for the house in “The Housemaid,” and the beautiful yes-and-ing that led to the inclusion of the staircase in that film. Jim also hosted a Toolkit conversation with director Paul Feig that may well convince you to see “The Housemaid” three times, as Jim already has.
Jim also put out a great piece on the stuntwork in “One Battle After Another,” and I had a blast talking to the cinematographer behind “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” about teaching the show’s young actors to use the camera as a scene partner; the show is really sweet, and the people making it seem like they are, too. I also spoke to some additional folks behind the scenes of “Ponies,” about the joyful work of dropping hints about the characters and their evolving relationships through clothes and mise-en-scene.
We have some fun work coming up, too. In February, we’ll post some fantastic toolkits on “Train Dreams,” “Jay Kelly,” and “If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You,” for some ’25 b-sides if you’re sick of reading about “Sinners,” “One Battle After Another,” and “Frankenstein.” Now, if you’re not sick of the Oscar films yet, well, good news! We have some cool new things coming about the making of “Sinners,” “Frankenstein,” and… “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” too. I’m quite excited — an emotion I certainly did not know I’d feel about a “Game of Thrones” spinoff — to be diving into “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” for the site shortly, too.
We’ll have some things coming about Westeros’s okay-est grand tourney as we get closer to that finale. And for you sickos who want to track and rank all the surgeries in “The Pitt,” Ben Travers is now doing that!
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