Jackie Fang will usually attend a rehearsal or two if she’s working a project to get a feel for the actors she’s working with, and for the ensemble piece “Ministry of Loneliness,” she surmised that no one character should ever dominate the frame.
“Composition-wise, we didn’t really want to necessarily center the characters because it’s a very powerful to frame someone to be in the center, but none of those characters that we saw felt that they’re in the center of even themselves, so we decided [everyone would appear] just off-center, and maybe as we go that things start to shift a little bit,” recalled the cinematographer of her second collaboration with the director Randa Ali after their previous short “Kingdom of Strangers.” “Then a lot of things aren’t said, but show up in the body language.”
At first, it seems like things aren’t said in “Ministry of Loneliness” when the employees at the call center for a DMV-esque bureaucracy in the surreal dramatic short have much in common with one another, but unconsciously have quite a bit to connect over with the strangers they deal with from afar on a daily basis, checking in on people with no obvious friends or family to gauge their level of loneliness and provide comfort. Compassion seems to be a little easier to dole out over the phone than face-to-face when the place is run by a stern supervisor named Magaly (Magaly Castellanos), who isn’t about to let her emotions show even after she recently suffered a personal loss and simply isn’t having it when Giulia (Caledonia Wilson) asks if she’ll join her on her intramural curling team. Otto (Dion Cortez), a new employee, is more receptive, but still reticent while getting his feet wet and another Hassan (Samuel Code) appears all to comfortable to place a distance between himself and his colleagues in the break room.
Yet one is tipped off that there may be flickers of hope for them all to connect quite literally when the dull blue walls of the office are offset with the bits of light that are allowed to flood into the office, making the slight bursts of more vibrant colors all around more apparent. It is just one way in which Fang makes the high concept fantastical short as affecting as it is, helping to fashion a credible world for it to take place in, accommodating both a sense of isolation and whimsy. The director of photography has shown in her work so far to consider frames big enough to hold a wide array of emotions, often in conflict with one another but reflecting holding space in a world that feels as if it’s constantly pulling away. With “Ministry of Loneliness” now making its way around the festival circuit, with its most recent stop at LA Shortsfest, Fang spoke about her part in the bittersweet confection, how she became interested in cinematography and her future plans.
It seems like you could have been an artist in any number of fields, how did you end up finding your way to cinematography?
I don’t really have a clear answer when I first started to study art and film. I didn’t even know there was a word called cinematography, let alone an actual job, so I just started with photography, which is very easy thing to get your hands on. I started with darkroom photography, so we had to learn how to shoot and and process our films and also print on the actual paper with the enlarger, so it’s a very physically involved process. I found it fascinating because I grew up with digital, so [still photography] wasn’t a part of my childhood and [working in a darkroom] I felt very involved personally, no matter what I was doing at the time when I take the photo, because of the process made me more conscious of what I’m capturing. I felt I have to respect the process.
Later, I took a [few] sculpture classes and it’s a very different form of art, but I found I really appreciate craftsmanship. I really love making stuff from scratch because it’s more about the effort and how much time you really contribute into making something. I was introduced to my first cinematography class and then I was like, “Wow, this is really interesting.” I felt so involved and it just clicked. I didn’t feel as limited as I am in photography. I’m capturing a moment instead of just a quick second for people to look at.
You also seem to have found a regular collaborator in Randa Ali, with whom “Ministry of Loneliness” is your second film together. How did you meet?
Randa is a cohort of mine at UCLA and for class projects, we have our little group, so Randa and I were in the same group and when she had her first short film that she made “Kingdom of Strangers,” we agreed to work on it together because by that time we already established a good friendship and trust. “Ministry of Loneliness” was actually another project and it actually wasn’t as personal a project. It was under [this initiative] called the Theater/Film Collaboration, where we bring filmmakers from the film department [who work with] production and costume designers from the theater department at UCLA and have everybody collaborate together. So yeah, Rhonda got the directing opportunity and I got to be the DP.
There are three projects [that are greenlit] and we all have to use the same set that the production designers built, so it’s the same space that the other two films are shot in and we have to maneuver our story around it. So we have to work with this limitation to begin with and the production designer Marie really did a really fantastic job. The space itself says a lot about the emotion that we’re trying to deliver. It’s this very nostalgic and a little bit melancholy and lonely [place] and Marie aged the wall, painting them to look older and outdated.
It’s fascinating to hear that you didn’t have control over certain things in the production design, because I was going to ask about shooting on a soundstage where I know you would have more control over a set. Was that interesting?
Yeah, we couldn’t do much with the space itself, like we couldn’t move the wall and replace it with something else or really extend it, but we could change the color of the wall. “Forgotten” is a good word to describe the vibe that we were going for [in general] and when Randa and I were talking about the visuals, we’re not really filmmakers that follow the traditional Hollywood [thinking in terms of] coverage and we wanted to make it so that you’d feel time in the visual. We thought color would be a very big part of our storytelling tools, and the walls are more on the blue side, so the lighting in the actual office space tends to be more cooler and there are only glimpses of warmth, but that’s not the dominant color. We also decided to have the the break room space to be the opposite side [of the spectrum] to give the audience a hint of the contrast of emotions that [the characters] are feeling.
Then we put a lot of emphasis on the props to really make it so that everything has this consistent look and we were still allowing ourselves to figure things out as we went into pre-production, like maybe two days before I went on set, I felt like the hallway should have a lamp, so I went to get those lamps and I asked Marie to age it and now it’s just a little something in the background that [livens that environment up].
Was there any particular equipment you wanted to use to get this look, especially when it came to the lenses?
We were working with a very limited budget to begin with, and I’m not someone that tends to think about camera too much. I think about the texture, [which] directly links to lenses. So with the limited budget, we have to choose whether to work with a better camera that we could have from school or a better set of lenses and I chose to have a better set of lenses, the Cooke Panchro Classic, which is a vintage set that not only has this creamy, soft Cooke look to it, but also it’s very true to the color [I saw on set], to my eye, and color is such an important tool in this film.
What’s it like to have this start to come out into the world?
I am super proud of “Ministry of Loneliness.” It’s probably my best achievement in cinematography so far in terms of how much control I had over the visuals and made it consistent. It’s hard because I think some people sometimes you can have really good shots but the whole film isn’t one whole piece and I think I was able to achieve that as close as I wanted [here], so I’m excited to see how far this film can go.
You’ve also been working on a feature-length documentary. Is it interesting to move between production methodologies that are that different?
I know the documentary kind of production and narrative world are very different, but I do find similarity in terms of how you tell a story. Documentary tends to be a little more spontaneous because you have less control and there’s a lot of stuff you have to just capture on the spot, so you may not even know what you’re going to get and having an open mind is very important. Documentary takes sometimes even longer to develop than narrative films, but I personally really like handheld work and in documentaries, we shoot verite style, so you need to be intuitive in capturing what you have to. Luckily, one of my mentors is a documentary cinematographer and I have been on set with him multiple times, and seeing how he works has given me a little base confidence. Then I’m actually writing a narrative short that I’m planning to shoot in China, in in my hometown next summer. It’s a little dark story, but it’s a slice of life told from two 11-year old girls’ perspective and the plot is basically about a chain of abuse based on true stories.
“Ministry of Loneliness” is currently playing on the festival circuit.