For almost a year, people have been plastered to every kind of screen except the one you find in a dark, crowded room—the one that compels you to put your phone away and, momentarily, forget your buzzing life. Still, even with theatergoing on hold, a host of directors—some veterans, some fresh voices—released new work into the world in 2020 and early 2021. Their movies enlivened us through months of sickness, uncertainty, and death.

None of these directors believes the pandemic marks the end of movies. As The Trial of the Chicago 7 director Aaron Sorkin told us, if theaters could survive radio and television, they’ll probably survive this. In the meantime, streaming and video on demand have allowed for investment in a wide, heartening range of filmmakers. Here, we pay tribute to 10 awards-worthy directors, including Radha Blank (The Forty-Year-Old Version), Lee Isaac Chung (Minari), Regina King (One Night in Miami...), and Spike Lee (Da 5 Bloods). —Cassie da Costa

CHLOÉ ZHAO

Quarantine wasn’t the first time Chloé Zhao was confined to her home. While shooting Nomadland, Zhao lived out of a van for four months. (Star Frances McDormand, as well as some of the crew, followed suit.) “The biggest adjustment is the lack of plumbing,” says the director, whose semi-improvisational drama offers an intimate portrait of life without a traditional roof over one’s head. “I’m naturally drawn to small places and not having a lot of things. So being able to have a set limitation of how much stuff I can take with me is very freeing.” —Caitlin Brody

SHAKA KING

Judas and the Black Messiah is a Trojan horse: a complex story about revolutionaries and reactionaries in the skin of a gangster movie. The film’s also a dual biopic, of both assassinated Illinois Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, and FBI informant and former petty criminal William O’Neal. Shaka King and his collaborators were inspired by films like When We Were Kings, Malcolm X, and especially the 1966 historical war drama The Battle of Algiers, which stages the fierce fight between North African fighters and the French government. “I’m interested to see what messages audiences take from [Judas],” King says, “because it’s a part of history that just hasn’t been taught.” —C.D.

SPIKE LEE

Delroy Lindo plays “a MAGA-hat-wearing motherfucker” in Da 5 Bloods, Spike Lee notes—but the filmmaker doesn’t think his movie plays much differently after Donald Trump’s defeat. “I think what changes is watching this film after Chadwick [Boseman] left us,” Lee says. “It makes the character of Stormin’ Norman even more mythical.” The director of Do the Right Thing is used to making films that resonate, sometimes in painful ways. Da 5 Bloods was no different. “That shit was hard as a motherfucker. Hard AF. AF. That’s for ‘as fuck,’ ” Lee says. —Anthony Breznican

EMERALD FENNELL

Emerald Fennell enjoys female-led revenge films but rarely relates to their lead characters. “I wanted to write something that would approximate what I might do if I wanted to reap revenge,” Fennell says. Her debut film, Promising Young Woman, follows an unlikely avenger: Carey Mulligan’s Cassie, a sharp-witted barista who hides her rage beneath fluffy bangs, pink hair ribbons, and multicolored manicures. Like its heroine, Promising Young Woman is not what it appears—its pop soundtrack (Charli XCX, Paris Hilton, a Britney Spears cover) and candy-colored palette belie a timely response to rape culture. “Everything about it feels, I hope, easy and pleasurable,” says Fennell, a former Killing Eve showrunner and actor on The Crown. “That’s part of its trap.” —Julie Miller

RADHA BLANK

Radha Blank is one of the rare directors who got to see audiences watching their films live and in person in 2020. The Forty-Year-Old Version, which Blank directed, wrote, produced, and stars in, premiered at Sundance before the pandemic. “I’m so glad I went to every single screening because I learned more about the film and how people responded to it,” says the first-time feature director, who went on to nab Sundance’s Vanguard Award after taking a directing prize at the festival. Shot on 35-mm film, Blank’s semi-autobiographical meta comedy has been in the making since 2013. “To me, what makes a filmmaker is not just the creative choices you make with the camera lens. It’s how you rise to the adversity that’s going to show up,” she says. “It was worth every bit of pain, every fight, every bit of confusion. The exhaustion is absolutely worth it.” —C.B.

REGINA KING

“I wanted to make a love story with Black leads and a historical backdrop—like a Titanic or something like that,” Regina King says of her directorial debut, One Night in Miami…. “While this is not a romance love story, it is definitely a love letter to the Black man’s experience.” The drama centers on a real-life 1964 gathering of Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke; King sees it as “a call to action.” Between editing One Night in Miami… and shooting a new film in Santa Fe, the Oscar winner recently started a vegetable garden to distract her from what she calls the “doom and Zooms.” The garden’s full of kale, herbs, peppers, and onions. “It’s gotten a bit neglected since I had to go to Santa Fe to film,” says King, “but it’s still thriving.” —C.B.

LEE ISAAC CHUNG

Minari, the semi-autobiographical story of a Korean immigrant family settling on a rural Arkansas farm in the 1980s, is obviously close to writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s heart. He’s especially proud of the offbeat friendship forged between Steven Yeun’s circumspect aspiring-farmer father and Will Patton’s white tongues-speaking Christian who helps the family work their land. “You have a film with evangelical Christians, charismatic Pentecostal Christians, Southern white farmers, and Korean immigrants,” the filmmaker says. “They’re all occupying the same space, and they’re interacting in a way that maybe our greater culture might not understand or predict. Our greater culture might expect a lot of tensions and conflicts within that grouping. But instead, with this film, we see people coming together.” —A.B.

AARON SORKIN

Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 was released months after the nation was roiled by a wave of anti-racism protests that looked a lot like the film’s central demonstration. “It’s chilling. I’ve been asked if the script changed to mirror current events,” says Sorkin, who wrote and directed the courtroom drama. “I didn’t. Current events changed to mirror the script.” Still, he has hope for brighter days ahead—for his industry as well as the nation. “I’m clinging to the belief that theaters will be back. That people want the experience of being part of an audience—laughing out loud and gasping and crying and being silent,” says the Oscar winner. “Movies survived radio and television, and I think they’re going to survive this.” —C.B.

KELLY REICHARDT

Life imitated art in First Cow, a story about the bonds of friendship. “You’re watching a relationship being formed between two people because they’re in this project together,” Kelly Reichardt says. It helped that stars John Magaro, who plays baker Otis “Cookie” Figowitz, and Orion Lee, who plays aspiring businessman King-Lu, were perfectly suited to their roles. “Orion is always looking at the bigger picture of, ‘Is the film saying something? Is this working?’ And Magaro is always into the smaller moment: ‘Is this how I should make this oily cake?’ It’s just weird that it worked out that way.” —C.D.

PAUL GREENGRASS

John Ford was on Paul Greengrass’s mind while shooting News of the World, which takes place in Texas just after the Civil War. The film, he says, is “almost The Searchers in reverse, [which] struck me as incredibly contemporary.” Tom Hanks, naturally, is in the John Wayne role as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a former Confederate soldier who’s lost everything. In a polarized world, says Greengrass, Kidd finds a way to “connect community with community and find the road out of division.” For obvious reasons, the message resonates. “Whatever our politics, we would probably all agree that our world is bitterly divided and in need of healing.” —C.D.

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