by Sarah Shachat, IndieWire
50 directors of photography tell IndieWire about the choices they made to bring the worlds of their films to life.
Throughout the year, IndieWire asks cinematographers with films premiering at major festivals to tell us what formats, cameras, and lenses they chose in order to create the look of their films, and how those choices helped them craft visual worlds that range from the gritty to the grandiose. The point is never to count the number of ALEXA 35s or Sony Venice 2s, nor to acknowledge how nice it would be to shoot on film if the budget allows. It’s to see how cinematographers get inventive, solve problems, and capture a protagonist’s inner-world or the feeling of being in a specific place and time through the imagery we see.
If there’s a running theme among the narrative features playing at the 2026 SXSW festival, it’s scrappy cinematography. Sometimes this is quite literal. Danny Madden, the director and director of photography on “Downbeat,” told IndieWire that since the main conceit of his film involved making art with trash, it only made sense to shoot the movie with a Handycam. “It brings a kind of raw access that felt correct for this movie about a feral guy tumbling his way through a dirty city. Shooting on a camcorder is also sort of spiritually linked to the story — make with what you’ve got — and I had a $900 used camera I bought with Kickstarter money,” Madden said.
Likewise, Gemma Doll-Grossman, the cinematographer of “Sender,” told IndieWire that the key element dictating the look of the film was cardboard boxes. “The camera remains stubbornly static (No pans! No tilts!), unless it’s rigged to an everyday object — a tube of lipstick, a pill bottle, a cardboard box — which offers the impression of surveillance,” Doll-Grossman said. “Most of the film is captured with 12mm and 18.5mm lenses, which emulated a security camera’s perspective and gave our protagonist a wide canvas to play. And, undoubtedly, our aspect ratio is boxy 3:2.”
But scrappiness has a wide range of meanings. DP Bella Gonzales refused to be satisfied with the tropes of drug trip imagery for “Pizza Movie,” and spent months with her business partner Andrew Laboy researching and developing handmade custom filters. “We experimented with hundreds of materials — often layering and combining them — to create effects that felt original, tactile, and slightly surreal. To push those filters further, my camera assistants Michael “Moose” Belardi and Adam Gonzalez worked with gaffer Kevin Kim to build a custom matte box that allowed us to interact with the filters using external light. That flexibility gave us the ability to shape and activate the textures in camera, creating a visual language that felt playful, handcrafted, and specific to the film,” Gonzales told IndieWire.
Read the answers below to see how each of these 50 cinematographers created a visual language specific to their film.
"The Seekers of Infinite Love"
