‘Encanto’ Director Byron Howard And Crew On Honoring Colombia’s “Tradition Of Emotional Storytelling” – Contenders Film: The Nominees

Encanto will bring its magic to the 94th Academy Awards. The enchanting story about the Madrigals shows a side of Colombia that stays away from stereotypical shows and movies people are used to seeing.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans EditorWhile the Madrigal family is the heart of Disney’s “Encanto,” another key character in the film is Casa Madrigal, the family’s magical home and center of the narrative.From the very beginning, co-writer and co-director Charise Castro Smith says the creative team knew that the house would be a reflection of the family and their magical powers, with a personality and a point of view.“We knew it was going to be alive, magical and fun and a friend to the kids who lived in the house,” she says.Each room in the house also had its own personality and early on, Castro Smith says the magic of technology allowed her to visualize the world of “Encanto” through VR.“The visual design team modeled it in 3D, so we got to put a headset on and walk through the house.” That process came in handy when she was polishing the story that is rooted in magical realism — she was able to step into the casita and immerse herself in the experience. Although the house is alive, in designing the home, associate production designer Lorelay Bove added touches that were inspired by Colombian homes while making sure it oozed energy and vibrancy.The kitchen had items that would be found in a cocinar Colombiana, “like a molinillo, which is a hot chocolate stirrer, a corn grinder and traditional clay pottery called La Chamba,” Bove says.“The one thing the directors said was that there needed to be truth to the materials.

Deadline has launched the streaming site for Contenders Film: The Nominees, this past weekend’s showcase of 24 Oscar-nominated films and their stars, creatives and craftspeople talking about their roads to the Academy Awards.

An Oscar nominee for Best International Feature, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom marks a first for the country of Bhutan, which has only ever submitted two films for consideration (and actually entered Lunana two years in a row following its earlier disqualification on a technicality). Filmmaker Pawo Choyning Dorji and star Sherab Dorji joined us for Contenders Film: The Nominees to discuss the making of the movie, a charming story of a teacher who is reluctantly transferred to a remote village and ends up learning quite a bit throughout his journey.

From the Warsaw Film School, Tadeusz Łysiak’s The Dress is nominated in the Live Action Short category at the Oscars. A poignant story about the desire for love and intimacy, it stars Anna Dzieduszycka as Julka, a short-statured woman who struggles with social rejection because of her appearance.

In the Oscar-nominated animated short film Boxballet, a gargantuan boxer and a willowy ballerina cross path unexpectedly. They develop feelings for each other, but given the enormous gulf between their backgrounds, the question becomes whether love can truly bring them together.

The U.S. is not the only country with growing income inequality. The same is true of China, a phenomenon explored in the Oscar-nominated feature documentary Ascension, from MTV Documentary Films.

After sweeping the awards at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, capped by a fest-record $25 million sale to Apple, CODA has proven to be the little engine that could.

Thirty-four years after the original Coming to America was released starring Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall, a sequel, Coming 2 America, finally arrived — and like the first film has been Oscar-nominated for its makeup and hairstyling. Tasked with bringing it all up to date and making the various guises and multiple roles Murphy and Hall take on really work for a new audience are Mike Marino, who did Special Effects Makeup, as well as Hair Department heads Stacey Morris and Carla Farmer. They all joined me on Amazon Studios’ panel for Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees.

Joining Deadline as part of the Amazon Studios presentation at Contenders Film: The Nominees event were two of the stars of Aaron Sorkin’s funny, moving and cleverly constructed story of the relationship of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in Being the Ricardos, which all takes place in a week during the course of a taping of an episode of I Love Lucy.

At Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees event, Dune‘s Oscar-nominated producer Mary Parent said that “it will be the fall” when the sequel to the feature take of the Frank Herbert novel rolls cameras, “not the summer” as previously expected.

King Richard director Reinaldo Marcus Green, writer Zach Baylin, star Aunjanue Ellis and film editor Pamela Martin joined Warner Bros’ panel at Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees event.

At Contenders Film: The Nominees, Deadline presented a panel with the director and star of perhaps the most historic nominated film at this year’s Oscars, Drive My Car, which represents Japan’s first-ever Best Picture nomination. It’s an astounding feat for a three-hour Japanese-language film, about a stage director’s personal crisis interweaved with his trip to Hiroshima to direct a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.

“It didn’t have to end this way.”

Paolo Sorrentino won the Foreign Language Oscar, as it was known then, in 2014 with his film The Great Beauty. He returns to the frame this year with The Hand of God, perhaps his most personal picture, which is nominated for Best International Feature. This lightly fictionalized tale of Sorrentino’s own youth in Naples, as he grappled with family tragedy, celebrated Diego Maradona’s arrival at his local football team, and took his first steps into his love of cinema, stars newcomer Filippo Scotti as Fabi Schisa, a teenager struggling to find his place in the world.

Adam McKay is known for, among other things, his blistering satires, Vice and The Big Short among them. His latest, the four-time Oscar-nominated Don’t Look Up, takes aim at our ignorance of climate change, our politics and our obsession with tech.

With his film Flee, which recently scored a historic trifecta of Oscar nominations in the categories of Animated Feature, Documentary Feature and International Feature, Jonas Poher Rasmussen cleverly fused two cinematic mediums to help his longtime friend tell a painful, personal story that for decades he kept to himself, while maintaining his anonymity.

“We were waiting for another script, and then suddenly before the pandemic, he said, ‘Read this’,” Oscar-nominated Licorice Pizza producer Adam Somner says about how Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest project came to fruition. “It came out of the blue. It was definitely a surprise.”

“I believe that a big reason why this ambitious idea of throwing a music festival in Harlem in which somewhere between 70,000 to 90,000 people every weekend would see performances was so that there was something joyous and hopeful for people at that point were kind of at the end of their rope,” Summer of Soul (Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson says about the importance the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival had to a Black America ravaged by violence and assassination.