‘New Strains’ filmmakers on shooting a meta story during early COVID

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — With Dr. Anthony Fauci back in the news as the U.S. reflects on its COVID-19 era, it seems the pandemic will remain a hot topic long after the numbers surged.

Back when they were surging, however, residents remained indoors in major cities across the U.S., from Los Angeles to New York. One married couple with filmmaking experience even capitalized on the lockdown parameters by picking up an old camcorder and shooting an entire feature film about the experience.

Shot during the COVID lockdown in New York City, “New Strains” is the latest project from Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan, who will screen the fictional film at Los Angeles’ Now Instant Image Hall this week. 

The film — dubbed a “low-fi” production due to the retro camcorder look — relies on improvised dialogue and a full cast of nonprofessional actors. As Shaw explained to Spectrum News, that meant that neither she nor her husband — who star as the main couple — couldn’t diverge much from their personalities.

“But obviously, we did need to create conflict in the movie. So in real life, I wasn’t completely irresponsible about COVID,” said Shaw in reference to her comically laissez-faire character amid the lockdown policies. “But I think we needed to create two characters that would have a very different approach. So my character’s a bit more flippant and resistant to understanding the gravity of the situation.”

“This is a time when storefronts on every street corner were shuttered, ambulances on the street,” said Kamalakanthan. “And so, we thought, if we were going to pursue this idea, we would have to just kind of do it ourselves. And again, in a way, we’re used to working in indie cinema and DIY filmmaking. But we had never attempted to make a film with just two people, both in front of and behind the camera… And so it was a really interesting experiment for us to figure out whether it could be done.”

The filmmakers play lead characters Kallia and Ram, who are already bickering when we first see them in “New Strains” as they begin a vacation in New York. Once a mysterious pandemic causes a nationwide lockdown in the film, however, their plans are ruined, and they descend to absurd depths of jealousy and co-dependence over time.

“So many millennials ended up moving in back with their parents at home, regressing a lot of ways,” said Shaw, in thinking about the effects of lockdown and how it led many to revisit certain pastimes. “It was fun to shoot on a camera that really reminded us of our childhoods.”

More recently than the COVID-19 surge came a pair of strikes for the entertainment industry, and the utterly DIY approach that spawned “New Strains” seems to have struck a creative nerve with other filmmakers who have been able to see the movie thus far.

“We’ve had a lot of filmmakers approached us after we shot our film, a lot of folks who’ve been affected by strikes and also the industry not really fully bouncing back since COVID, and they’re like, ‘I want to make a project like this. I’m very interested in the process,'” said Kamalakanthan. “I think this condition of being locked down or feeling like the industry has stopped, or that things have come to a standstill, I think we’re gonna be seeing more of that in the decades and years to come. And I think that, hopefully, people that watch this film can also take something, not just a fun romantic-comedy experience away, but also a different understanding of what it means to make movies.”

Tickets for the Friday and Saturday screenings on “New Strains” can be purchased here.