Interview curated by Emilio M. Costa CCS and Lorenzo Scudiero CCS
Andrea, with A Lien. directed by brothers Sam and David Cutler-Kreutz and shot by you, you, earned an Oscar nomination. How did you get involved in the project? Did you already know the directors?
Sam and David are brothers. I had shot several music videos with Sam over the years, long before this project even existed. I met him in 2018 on a music video—back then, he was co-directing with another filmmaker I still work with. Eventually, each of them took their own path. Our early projects were zero-budget productions, made with gear we scraped together from here and there, relying on favors. Sam used to be a cinematographer—an excellent one—and he shot some beautiful work, but after years of juggling both roles, he eventually chose to focus solely on directing, teaming up with his brother. David, on the other hand, doesn’t come from the film world—he’s an elementary school teacher, and this is his final year of teaching. During Oscar week, he didn’t attend any of the official events because he was camping in Nevada with his students—15 kids. A wonderful thing. Of course, David has always had a deep passion for cinema and directing.
What led them to work together on this kind of project?
From the very beginning, part of their vision was to move away from music videos and commercials to focus on narrative projects. They would use the money earned from other jobs to fund one short film each year. They reached out to me and sent me the A Lien project, which partly tells a story I’ve lived through myself. I was never deported, thankfully, but the film portrays a process that every immigrant in the U.S. goes through. It’s not an easy country to get a visa for, and over the past ten years, immigrants have often been treated like criminals. When you enter the United States, you have to be screened—they need to know who you are. You go through a process in which, in a way, you have to prove you’re not a criminal. But with this film, our intention wasn’t to make a direct social critique or take a political stance. Also, A Lien was shot in 2021, so no longer during the Trump era, when tensions were especially high. We conceived it more as a film that reflects our perspective on that situation—we called it a “bureaucratic horror.” Many elements were inspired by classic horror films, both in terms of stylistic choices and the techniques we used while shooting.
It really sounds like a true independent film.
I wasn’t expecting something so raw, nor did I realize a truly independent “wave” like this could exist in America. In Europe, there’s a tendency to think that things are easier, more optimistic, at least in the film industry. But it’s fascinating to see how, even there, you still have to be resourceful, navigate the system, and come up with creative ways to get something made within a real industry. When you first read the script, what did you feel? I’d love for you to share that emotion and how it translated into your work.
My very first reaction was: “This can’t be real.” The story is about someone going in for their green card interview—the final stage of the immigration process—which should be a joyful moment, something to celebrate. Instead, during the interview, this person is arrested by ICE, the U.S. immigration police, and deported. So my first thought was: “How could that actually happen?” I asked them to explain the legal basis behind the story. When you’re making a film like this, you want to be sure that everything you’re portraying is true, backed by real research. And that was the case—we had multiple lawyers who brought us real cases that mirrored exactly what we were depicting. The whole project was sparked by a 2018 New York Times article that told the story of a family who went through this very experience. So on one hand, it was shocking: once I got my visa, I had stopped thinking about what could have happened to me, and this story reawakened so many emotions tied to my own immigration journey—what it means to leave your country and start a life somewhere else.
What affected my work the most was the search for the right point of view from which to tell this story. That became the other major topic of discussion with the directors, because there are three main characters: the father, the mother, and the daughter. The point of view shifts throughout the film. At first, we follow Oscar, the father, who is the protagonist up until about halfway through. Then gradually, the perspective shifts to the mother—and, in a way, to us as viewers. The mother isn’t in the room when everything happens; she’s in another part of the building and experiences the events through a FaceTime call, where she can barely see what’s going on. Like us, she can’t fully understand what’s happening—she’s not there, she can’t intervene. In that sense, she represents our perspective. She’s American, and we’re not, but as the audience, we find ourselves in a similar position. We’re powerless. And that creates a strong sense of frustration—what can you do in a situation like that? What can you do when it’s the government itself using the law against you? From the very beginning, our main discussions were exactly about this: whose point of view do we want to tell the story from?
Where does the title come from? Was that the title from the beginning?
Yes, that was the original title. It’s pronounced “a liin.” Part of it is a play on the idea that an immigrant in the United States is labeled as an “alien.” But “lien” also has a legal meaning—it refers to a claim, a hold, or a restriction on property. For example, if you buy a car in installments, that car isn’t fully yours until you’ve paid it off; there’s a lien on it. The directors’ idea was that in bureaucratic processes like the one portrayed in the film, people are treated the same way—as if they’re not fully “themselves,” as if their identities are on hold, waiting for some kind of debt to be settled—a debt of documents, of recognition. Until that’s resolved, you’re just a number; you’re stuck in a gray area where your personhood isn’t acknowledged. These are dehumanizing procedures. Empathy is completely absent in these contexts. Someone working at an immigration desk sees hundreds of people a day, gets used to denying requests without even thinking about it. It’s like an ER doctor who witnesses death every day—at some point, they build an emotional barrier to protect themselves. Eventually, these workers stop asking themselves how they feel about what they’re doing, because it’s just their job. It’s not about cruelty—not from the agents or the clerks—it’s the nature of the system itself that creates emotional numbness. That’s why we asked the actors playing officials and officers to always speak in the same tone of voice, without showing any emotion, positive or negative. Not to make them seem robotic, but to show how these terrible dynamics become routine. For the person affected, it’s a life-changing trauma; for the one delivering it, it’s just another day at the office.
Yes, that really comes through in the film. There’s no emotion, not even in the faces—they’re very, very neutral, almost clinical.
I’d like you to tell us about the conversation you had with the director regarding the camera style. How did you decide on the format?
When it came to the technical side—the camera, the lenses, and so on—everything was determined by what we could afford, not by a predefined aesthetic choice. It wasn’t about saying “I want to shoot open gate,” but rather figuring out what we had access to. From the start, I wanted to shoot everything handheld, even the more static scenes—and that’s exactly what we did. A friend had an ALEXA Classic and a set of Super Speeds, so we used those. The handheld camera, almost always on tight focal lengths—50mm, 85mm—came from narrative needs. The goal was to create a sense of claustrophobia and confusion. The camera moves between extreme close-ups, brief lateral shots with blurred background fragments, and then cuts back to the protagonist’s face. Everything works together to reflect the characters’ state of mind—anxiety, disorientation…
Another choice was dictated directly by the location. The main space looked believable as an immigration office, but just outside the frame—like to the right of the room—there was a classroom, so the space was clearly part of a school. We couldn’t afford a wide shot with something like an 18mm, because it would have revealed that we weren’t in a real government office. So we turned that limitation into a creative decision: we shot everything in controlled directions, using longer lenses, even 135mm. We applied the same principle in the arrest scene. The location gave us two corridors that seemed appropriate, but one ended in a recognizable atrium. We solved it by always filming the characters walking in the same direction down the same corridor, simply repositioning the camera when they were supposed to “turn around.” Since the space was dark, sterile, and lit with neon, no one could tell we never moved. It’s a short film made with incredibly minimal resources, almost absurdly so. Everyone—friends, collaborators—worked for free.
One of the most interesting things, as the director pointed out later, is that almost everyone involved was a director themselves: the AD, the producer, the production designer… they all had directing experience and a personal vision. That had a huge impact on set—everyone contributed ideas, made suggestions, even pointed out details I might have missed. Looking back, I think that collective spirit was one of the film’s greatest strengths. Even visually: in many short films that try to depict police procedures or institutional settings, the fiction shows—maybe the costumes are good, but the background extras don’t feel convincing. In A Lien, everything feels believable. People watch it and wonder: “How did they manage to pull this off?”
I never would’ve guessed it was a school—even though institutional buildings can often look alike. The spaces within the frame were filled really well. There’s always movement in those places, lots of people coming and going.
We had 20 extras that we reused in different ways by changing their clothes. Sometimes we’d show them from the front, other times from the back. It was like a deck of cards we kept shuffling around from room to room.
That’s exactly the essence of independent filmmaking: being able to build a tight-knit team where everyone contributes actively and shares ideas. It’s not easy—because not every suggestion leads in the right direction—but in this case, from the way you describe it, it sounds like it all happened naturally. Another interesting thing about the short is that you don’t need to know what came before or after the story—you’re fully immersed in that one moment. And even though, as European viewers, we haven’t lived that experience ourselves, we know these things happen, and the film makes us feel it as if it were happening to us. A Lien It makes visible a microcosm we tend to overlook—made up of people simply seeking a better future. And that coexistence of tension, apathy, and the longing to be seen is incredibly powerful.
It’s the theme of the “banality of evil”: there’s no master plan to ruin someone’s life—it’s simply the nature of certain systems, which leave no room for emotion. The real issue is that immigration offices deal with people—mothers, fathers, children, grandparents—who aren’t treated as human beings, but as numbers, as files that come in and out. If document C74X is missing, they just tell you, “Come back tomorrow”—a situation we’ve all experienced in some form, even just at a registry office. But here, there’s so much more at stake: you’re in a foreign country, facing the very real risk of being deported. The nightmare becomes real, and there’s no one there to help you. The problem lies entirely in the approach: there’s no empathy, no one saying, “I’m sorry, this document is missing—let’s see how I can help.”
It’s a political film. Did you encounter any obstacles? In Italy, for example, when you apply for a location, they often want to know exactly what’s going to be filmed there—and of course, they’re free to decide whether or not to let you in.
Not when we were filming, no. And once the film was finished, it had its own little journey. But on the festival circuit, it didn’t go as well as we had hoped. It screened at the Seattle Film Festival, the Austin Film Festival, and others—but we were expecting a different kind of reception. It did fine, but nothing major. None of us could really understand why. We were all happy and proud to have made it, and then last October, it was released on Vimeo and got selected as a Vimeo Staff Pick. That’s when people really started watching it. It was shared by a lot of short film pages, and surprisingly, three and a half years after we shot it, we suddenly found ourselves on the Oscars longlist. We were thrilled—but none of us thought we’d get any further. Because even with short films, an Oscar campaign involves heavy PR, and it starts months before the longlist is even announced. To get nominated, Academy members need to know you exist—and vote for you.
But when we made the shortlist—15 films, down from 165—that’s when we started to believe it might actually happen. The two directors reached out to Adam McKay’s production company—McKay, who directed The Big Short. He came on board as executive producer for the short. We had three weeks to put together a campaign to try to land the nomination, and we did it totally scrappy—grassroots, as they say here—with no official support. We just wrote to people directly, saying: “This is our short film, please watch it.”
When we actually got nominated, we were all shocked. It’s a short made on a $30,000–35,000 budget—which in the U.S. is basically nothing. The key grip and gaffer were guys I work with on commercials; they came on almost for free, brought their truck for free. The camera, like I said, was from a friend—I checked it out myself, using accessories from another friend. The only thing I asked Sam for was a focus puller. That had to be someone experienced, because we were shooting handheld at 85mm, wide open at 1.3, running around with the camera—not an easy task. When they introduced me to the focus puller, it turned out to be a screenwriting student from Columbia University. I asked her, “Have you ever done this before?” She said, “Yeah, two or three times, on school projects.” “Okay, perfect!” She was stepping in for the original focus puller for the first couple of days. I don’t know how, but she pulled it off.
All of that made me question whether we really need all the things we usually insist on having! You know there are betting odds on the Oscars, right? An hour before the announcement, we were the frontrunners—odds were 1 to 4 for our win. We didn’t win, but we went from complete obscurity to being the favorite. I honestly don’t know how it happened.
There’s one thing I do think about, though. When we shot the film, Trump had just left office. And when the nominations were announced—he had just been re-elected. Our film gained relevance because the world was heading back in that negative direction.
What I really liked was the visual sense of chaos. You mentioned earlier that you worked around the space to find the right angles—how did you choreograph the actors? There’s one moment in particular that struck me: when the mother tries to get information from a woman who’s completely lost in thought, almost as if she’s talking to a wall. Was that a happy accident, or were you actively looking for those kinds of moments?
I mentioned it earlier—one of our key references was horror cinema. One of my main inspirations was Keane by Lodge Kerrigan, the story of a father who loses his daughter in a train station and keeps going back every day for years, gradually losing touch with reality. That film explores the psychological consequences of trauma, but it does so through a very physical style: entirely handheld, always focused tightly on the protagonist, with background characters moving around him in this almost dreamlike way. We tried to do something similar—stay locked onto our protagonists, avoid cutting to other figures, even the police officers, unless they were in the same frame. The idea was to make the viewer feel immersed, right in the middle of the action.
Some visual elements happened by chance, like the reflections—they weren’t planned, but we discovered them during shooting and decided to keep them because they felt real and added something authentic. A key moment for me came early on, during the first corridor scenes. We were at the end of this very long hallway—about 150 meters—shooting with an 85mm: a tight, compressed frame, but with deep perspective. The father was walking toward us, carrying his daughter under these harsh neon lights. Sam, who—as I’ve said—is also a cinematographer, suggested turning off the first six lights to create a more dramatic, cinematic contrast. Something you’ve “seen a thousand times.” But I said no. That wouldn’t have made sense—a real immigration office doesn’t have the first few lights turned off while the rest are on in the background. Sure, it would’ve looked more beautiful—but it wouldn’t have been believable.
I wanted the film to feel like a documentary: no visual tricks, no overly composed shots just for their own sake. I wanted to avoid those moments where you’re trying to “get the perfect shot.” For this project, sometimes it’s okay for the lighting to be a little uglier, a little harsher—because that’s how those offices actually look.
And many of the scenes were shot at night, even though they were supposed to look like daytime, because parts of the building were operational and we could only access them after hours. So we often had to shoot in day-for-night or night-for-day mode.
You tried to tell the story in a style that—if we can put it this way—was as documentary-like as possible, or rather, as realistic as possible, more than strictly documentary.
For me, it was more about taking away light than adding it. In many scenes, it was enough to turn off three background lights and place a light mat on the side, and that was it. The space was already lit from above, and we were moving 360 degrees around the actors, so the lighting had to be compatible with that freedom. We gave the actors complete autonomy in their movements: we only indicated the beginning and end of the action; we let them move freely within the space – with the sole precaution of avoiding certain angles. Once we finished a take, we would shoot it all over again from their point of view. I would retrace every step: I followed the mother’s movements, where she had looked, how she had moved, and we redid everything. In fact, many scenes are built on the alternation between her face, what she is looking at, and then her again or a detail behind her. We shot entire sequences in POV, where everyone – including the extras – repeated their previous actions exactly, only the actress playing the mother was sometimes behind me to guide my movements. Some sequences were very complex: long corridors, physical actions, intricate paths. It wasn’t easy to remember every single step, but we reconstructed it with precision to make the point of view authentic.
All of this has to do with managing the lighting on set. As for the color, was the choice for that flat, muted desaturation made back in the planning phase, or was it something that you developed in the moment, letting yourself be influenced by the environment? I’m interested in understanding if it was an aesthetic decision made from the outset or a need that emerged during filming, in an attempt to be as faithful as possible to the reality of those locations and the inner desolation they evoke.
With the color, I didn’t want to simply “respect reality”: I also wanted to push it in a specific direction. One of the main references was All the President’s Men, both for its aesthetic and its palette. With Dante Pasquinelli, the colorist I’ve been collaborating with for 6 or 7 years and who works on almost all my projects, we created a custom LUT before shooting. I shot everything with that LUT applied in-camera. The scenes in the car, however, we shot with a RED Komodo: I needed a more compact camera to be able to move with agility, especially in a confined space with a child on board. The ALEXA Classic, with all its accessories, would have been unmanageable in that context. When we got to the color grade, we started with the original LUT and adapted it to the ALEXA footage. At one point, out of curiosity, Dante tried to copy and paste the grade from the ALEXA onto the Komodo, even though we knew it wouldn’t work—they have two completely different color spaces. And, as expected, the image “broke,” but in a way we liked. Yes, there were artifacts in the highlights, but there was also something interesting in terms of contrast and saturation. So, Dante manually recreated that look on the Komodo footage to make it consistent and technically stable. In the end, we were so convinced by the result that we did the reverse: we took that look born from the Komodo and reapplied it, re-adapting it, to all the ALEXA footage. It was a true happy accident: an expected error that generated a more desaturated aesthetic with more “milky,” lifted blacks, which ultimately became the final look of the film.
Still on the subject of lighting, I really liked the approach you chose. I find the short film believable, authentic, but at the same time I recognize that in a real office you wouldn’t necessarily see that exact image. It’s a very interesting photographic choice. I also appreciated the ending, with her face lit by sunlight, and the decision—as you mentioned earlier—to avoid overly stylized solutions, like in the corridor scene, where it would have been easy to “overdo it” and draw attention in a forced way. When choreographing those long sequence shots, how did you manage the lighting? Did you adapt to the actors’ movements as you went along, or did you already have a precise idea and start with a clear plan from the beginning?
I like lighting spaces, not faces. There’s a phrase people use a lot here in the U.S.: “light places, not faces.” It makes total sense in commercial work, but I think it’s a useful principle for narrative filmmaking too. My personal enemy, for example, is the C-stand. I hate it. That approach of lighting from one side and then ending up surrounded by a forest of flags—I used to do that early on, sure, when I was trying to build “perfect,” beautiful frames. But eventually you realize you’re taking valuable time away from the director and the actors. If they only have three minutes left to work through a scene and the performance ends up weak, what’s the point of having a gorgeous shot? I’d rather give the actors an hour to find the right energy and then solve the lighting in 30 minutes. It’s something I learned by making mistakes—or rather, by trying things I no longer feel the need to repeat.
In this short, almost everything is lit from above. There were already neon lights in the space, so we just swapped them out with Asteras or added a bit of diffusion. We worked with what was already there, only adding lights when necessary. For example, in the hallway, we didn’t have 75 Asteras to install everywhere—we used the existing fixtures, placed the protagonist under a specific point, and diffused the last three lights, which weren’t visible anyway. The lighting crew was just two of us: a gaffer and a key grip. It wasn’t realistic to reconfigure everything, and we didn’t have the resources for it. So the approach was always to enhance what was already in place and adapt it.
A director once told me something that really stuck with me: there are two kinds of cinematographers—those who light the shot, and those who shoot the light. I see myself in the second group.
Do you want to talk about that sunlight in the final scene? When the characters are outside and they’re taking the father away, there’s this strong sunlight. Is it meant to be a symbol of hope?
That moment actually sparked one of the only real debates we had on set. This incredibly strong sun came out, and I didn’t want to shoot in that light. It was the emotional climax of the film—the moment when the family is torn apart. The light was beautiful, backlighting the police car, and the officer almost looked heroic. But the director insisted: “Precisely because the sun is out, we have to shoot it like this.” In the end, I let myself be convinced, even though I was strongly against it at first. And I was wrong—because visually, that light creates an ambiguous feeling, it throws you off balance.
And in a way, the positive reading also makes sense: the mother is able to get her daughter back, even if the family remains fractured. Sometimes, your instinct as a cinematographer can be off, right? It’s good when there are people around you who push you toward something else. It’s part of trusting the process. In the end, you’re making a film for your director. Yes, it belongs to everyone—but you’re making it with and for the director.
I really loved that light. When I got to that point, I thought it was the perfect idea—that it had to be the ending. I even moved the mouse over the image to check how much time was left. And it was the end—what a beautiful choice! Emotionally, it felt like the perfect conclusion.
The director will be thrilled to hear that.
There’s a contrast, because The officer is backlit, while she’s lit with a very harsh light. That’s the beauty of storytelling—we may have our own intentions, but in the end, the film is like a child that has to walk on its own, and everyone finds their own meaning in it.
Exactly, the film belongs to the audience. This one surprised us many times—it really has a life of its own.
Thank you, Andrea.
