To coincide with the release of their new feature Removal of the Eye, we present Prashanth Kamalakanthan and Artemis Shaw’s previous effort, the confinement comedy New Strains (Special Jury Award Winner at IFFR 2023). Filmed inside an Upper East Side apartment during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the directing couple’s film offers an in-the-moment skewering of lockdown anxieties. 

It all starts when unlucky lovers Kallia (Shaw) and Ram (Kamalakanthan) land in New York for an intended vacation that’s interrupted by the sudden spread of a mysterious new disease that makes full-grown adults start acting like babies. Stuck inside Kallia’s uncle’s luxurious apartment, the couple soon succumb to lockdown fever  — an experience that’s exacerbated by Ram’s frustrations with his career as a Soundcloud rapper and the reappearance of Kaila’s old neighborhood fling.

“With New Strains, we took pandemic as a unique opportunity to tell a story we could only tell at that specific time, in that specific way — with a decades-old home video camcorder, improvised dialog, zero crew, and a cast of non-professional friends and family, stuck in very similar situations. Throughout the film, so many documentary moments capture slices of New York life the likes of which we’ll likely never see again.” ARTEMIS SHAW

It’s this DIY-feel that accounts for much of New Strains’ joys, both in terms of its anything comes, anything goes plot and its formal playfulness. Kamalakanthan likened the process of making the movie to that of working on music, in which “you sit around and you noodle and sometimes songs come out, sometimes they don’t…. For certain kinds of films, that can be a really gratifying approach as well.” So, in addition to capturing the feeling that the world is falling apart in quasi-immediate fashion, New Strains also manages to capture the spark of art-making as it’s manifesting in real time.

Husband-and-wife duo Prashanth Kamalakanthan and Artemis Shaw have directed two feature films together. Kamalakanthan is an Indian-American filmmaker and educator who has made films for The New York Times, Mother Jones, and The Nation, among other outlets. He also teaches film theory and screenwriting at Virginia Commonwealth University and Brown University. Shaw is a Greek-American filmmaker, producer, and educator. She has taught film students at Tribeca Film Institute, Ghetto Film School, the Museum of the Moving Image, and Thaden School. Both of the films the duo has directed have premiered at IFFR to rave reviews.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Special thanks to Caroline Golum, Kate Stahl, Jake Perlin, Artemis Shaw, Prashanth Kamalakanthan, and MEMORY Films.