COVID19… SINS & VIRTUES ANTHOLOGY Premieres to Benefit The Actors Fund

The first tumbleweeds had barely started to collect on the streets of Hollywood under COVID-19 lockdown before fifty-plus filmmakers figured out a way to get cameras rolling again. Coordinating themselves using nothing but cell phones and Zoom, the filmmakers of the feature length anthology film COVID19... Sins and Virtues leaned into the restrictions of this new isolation in a business that thrives on social contact and in-person collaboration.

COVID19...Sins and Virtues will premiere on March 20, 2021, one year to the day from the first California lockdowns in 2020. All proceeds from the premiere will benefit The Actors Fund, an organization devoted to supporting performers and behind-the-scenes workers across the entertainment industry. A Q&A with the filmmakers will immediately follow, moderated by Sally Colon-Petree, Mario Calderon and Lizza Monet- Morales. The Premiere will be at 4:00 pm PST and details are at actorsfund.org.

The rules were simple: use only consumer-grade cameras (phones, webcams, etc.) and assets on-hand at lockdown, plan and produce your episode while adhering to the government-mandated isolation, and use, as your theme, the pandemic and one of the seven cardinal sins or virtues, which were randomly assigned to each filmmaking team.

The result is a film that feels viscerally recognizable to all of us who have come face to face over the past year with our laziness, our bravery, our frustrations, our resilience, our selfishness and our generosities. All the sins and virtues we'd never before had to confront at these extremes.

"Creativity nor friendship can ever be stopped," says producer Alex Mendoza. "The main goal was to have fun and find something to do to keep our sanity. To our surprise, this ended up being an entertaining, educating, and, we hope, inspiring film. What we, across the whole industry, have learned over this time will likely modify what we do in the future."

For Mendoza, COVID19... Sins and Virtues brings filmmaking back to its most basic form: a bunch of friends getting together, taking an impossible circumstance, and spinning it into art, making something great solely out of a shared vision and THE ASSETS on hand.

COVID19...Sins and Virtues is produced by Alex Mendoza and True Form Films Founder, actress/producer Yeniffer Behrens (The Way Back, Grey's Anatomy) and co-founder & partner, actor/producer Mauricio Mendoza (Resurrection Blvd., Blow.)

To post a comment, you must register and login.