CHESTNUT STREET, SAN FRANCISCO
Christopher Coppola, Director of Cinema Projects and Studies Associate Professor of Film Global Relations at San Francisco Art Institute, an accomplished film director who, since 1987 has directed 10 feature films, countless TV shows, and developed content for interactive platforms set during the 2020 academic year to create a short contemporary film based on Don Quixote by Cervantes. Christopher explains that his students were behind the inspiration of the project stating that they thought of themselves as his “living pallet”.
The film is based on three dreams. Each dream was sent to a different visual student and a composer to separately work on pieces of work that could stand on their own, before bringing them both together in one room and slightly tweaking them to create a sonic masterpiece. Each dream was given a theme and length, and the composer was told to write a tone poem that is not done for a visual, but on its own. Aside from this, the students were given free rein on how they interpreted this assignment. The idea was that the film was part classroom, part professional filmmaking. Originally, it was to be filmed in Spain, but due to Covid restrictions, production couldn’t move forward with this.
The film will premier later in the year and has already been accepted into many film festivals across the USA. Coppola is already preparing his next great literature to film class for Fall 2021 using “A Tale of Two Cities” working with both SFAI and Mississippi School of the Arts.