Cinematographer Adam Pietkiewicz has been dealing with patchy internet over the past few days. He and his crew have been sailing on the Baltic Sea and have finally docked at an undisclosed location in northeastern Poland. In a few weeks, Pietkiewicz will attend the Toronto International Film Festival to accept the Variety TIFF Artisan Award for his work on the film “Angh,” about the last surviving chief of a village in India near the Burma border in the 1960s.
While he has a number of shorts under his belt, this is only his second feature film. Their devotion to the traditional culture of their people is challenged by the arrival of a Christian missionary from the United States. Rio and Pietkiewicz’s relationship goes back to their film school days, and when the filmmaker mentioned that he was going to expand his short film of the same title, Pietkiewicz said yes.
Pietkiewicz explains, “He wanted to capture the rough and raw environment of the story.” The cinematographer used Arri cameras paired with Ultra Prime lenses. In addition to 16mm film, he worked with Kodak’s VISION3 250D and VISION3 500T film, mixing formats. It perfectly reproduced color and added to the grainy look of the film.” Navigating nighttime shoots proved to be a challenge for Pietkiewicz.
He explains that Nagaland didn’t have reliable electricity, which made shooting any nighttime sequences particularly difficult. Thanks to that, we were able to get enough exposure on their faces.” As for his shorthand with Rio, Pietkiewicz says they are both huge fans of simple and minimalist filmmaking with a very few camera setups per scene. The scene where the village burns down was shot entirely in camera with no VFX or CGI.
Pietkiewicz says that depsite their minimalist approach in front of the camera, behind the scenes, they created a detailed guidebook.
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