![]() During the height of the pandemic, Nadia was tasked to shoot the documentary of the making of the Super Bowl Halftime Show featuring The Weeknd, garnering her Best Director at the Sundance Brand Storytelling Awards 2021. Becoming is ranked as the fifth most watched Documentary ever on Netflix. ![]() The film was nominated for four Emmys including Best Director, Best Cinematographer and Best Documentary Feature, with Nadia breaking an Emmy record as the first person to receive both Directing and Cinematography nominations for the same project. Nadia was tapped by First Lady Michelle Obama to make Becoming for Netflix. Her fearless determination and dedication to storytelling led to her directing, first with After Maria which personalizes the human suffering from Hurricane Maria and led to being shortlisted for an Academy Award, as well as She’s the Ticket about women running for local office which won Special Jury Prize at SXSW. Nadia rose fast in film, breaking long entrenched stereotypes to become one of the most sought after verité cinematographers with credits including Oscar nominated Trouble the Water, and Sundance nominated Motherland. Nadia was raised in New York City and from a young age realized the power that film and photography have to shine a light on people who might otherwise be overlooked. Is it technology she fears, or simply the loss of what she knows? Users, sumptuous as it is to look at, has little new to say about the bane and boon that is modern technology.Nadia Hallgren is a multi award-winning Director and Cinematographer. ![]() There's something being lost, Almada suggests: yet when she talks about humanity in the past, it's really about the era of her own childhood, not the whole human epoch. Rarely has the clash between the biological and technological been so sumptuously portrayed. He's caught with an almost beatific luminescence, contrasting to the ragged geometry and sharp coloring that Cerf uses for landscapes and machinery. Interspersed in these epic and often abstract images is Almada's boy, shown at every stage from infancy to game-playing tween. To support this, cinematographer Bennett Cerf undoubtedly captures images of serene beauty, even in chaos. She uses lengthy shots and juxtapositions, repetition and visual alliteration, but there is a Theroux-esque insertion of the personal through a narrative technique that touches on her core thesis: that technology is separating us from our own selves and each other, while inflicting quiet carnage on the world. ![]() A visual mosaic, scored by the Kronos Quartet, it's Almada's musings about what an increasingly technologically interconnected but personally disconnected world means for her growing son.Īlmada's debt to Godfrey Reggio's Qaatsi films is not unique: most documentarians, it seems, are trying to be either Reggio, Louis Theroux, Errol Morris, or Barbara Kopple, and those are admirable footsteps in which to follow. ![]() "Absolutely random, and yet in perfect equilibrium," she notes at one moment of strange harmony in her personal history, and that's the overall sensation of watching Users. Documentary award at this week's festival, is gorgeous, and often fascinating, but rarely as profound as one might suppose. Natalia Almada's global/self-portrait, which took the U.S. Since the first wheel rolled, there has been one question about every technological development: what world will this create for our kids? In the age of rampant electronic communication and global trade on an unprecedented scale, that question is as sharp as ever, and it's the one posed in Sundance documentary Users. ![]()
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