
Up to the moment the cameras rolled, cinematographer Matthias K nigswieser, AAC wasn't sure White Bird: A Wonder Story would actually happen. Production of the feature film began in Prague in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, when most of Europe was on lockdown. Transporting crew, talent, and equipment required herculean effort and contingency planning, and if key personnel or talent tested positive for covid, the entire schedule could be upended or the production could be shut down. Lay on top of those difficulties a cold, mucky winter, and you have a recipe for what could have been a disaster.
K nigswieser channeled his anxieties about the situation into shooting the film. You take that intensity and you put it on screen, he says. Even though it was incredibly hard, when I shot, it was very much like a psychological as well as physical workout. You could blow off some steam and turn those feelings into art and imagery.
Based on writer R. J. Palacio's graphic novel, which is itself a prequel to her young-adult novel Wonder, White Bird is the story of a Jewish girl, Sara Blum (Ariella Glaser), and her polio-stricken classmate Julien (Orlando Schwerdt), who helps hide her from the Nazis in 1940s Vichy France. K nigswieser learned about the film adaptation in the summer of 2020, when director Marc Forster, for whom K nigswieser had shot 2018's Christopher Robin, approached him about shooting White Bird; the duo would subsequently reteam for the feature A Man Called Otto.
K nigswieser felt an immediate connection to the material. The very first thing that Marc said to me is that it's a really important story to tell right now, unfortunately, K nigswieser says. There are so many parallels to what happened in the '30s in Europe. There are so many things that people seemingly don't realize that I'd been almost force-fed in my youth, that this shall never happen again.' When a little flame of hate comes up, you need to extinguish it or it just gets going.
I was absolutely hellbent to do this film because, as an artist, you can feel like you live in vain, the cinematographer continues. You do all these vanity projects or commercials, but when do you make a statement and change the world for the better? I felt like this was an opportunity to go in that direction.
Though set in bleak and desperate times, White Bird at its heart is a teenage love story. Forster spoke to K nigswieser about trying to find a certain romanticism in the harsh environment of Sara's school, where many students had been seduced by the Nazi ideology, particularly the class bully, Vincent (Jem Matthews). We talked about the classroom being a microcosm of the world, like every classroom is, K nigswieser recalls. Future heroes and villains sharing a room. It's that pressure cooker of what the future will have in store for us all. The bully is not to be taken lightly, because if the bully doesn't get a readjustment in those early ages, he will take that as the method to go through life. The bully in the classroom might become the dictator in the future.
However, within that pressure cooker of the classroom, tenderness emerges. Julien becomes the hero of the story, K nigswieser says. Sara is being saved, but she's also being called out on her vanity, because she's one of the popular girls in class she's taking his generosity for granted. It has all these little things that are so true to life, and that's something we always held onto. You can get carried away with the backdrop, the war and the Nazis, but at the end of the day, it's about the classroom and the people that are in it, what happens to them under these circumstances.
In addition to the work of legendary painters including Jakub Schikaneder, Pieter Bruegel and Vilhelm Hammersh i, Forster and K nigswieser found inspiration in Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 masterpiece, The Conformist. In revisiting the film, K nigswieser was struck by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC's noir-like cinematography, how structured and systematic his compositions were, and how light and dark seemed to break the image into a grid. The power play of light and shadow is striking and fittingly metaphoric, K nigswieser observes.
An idea came to him that he would use as a motif throughout White Bird. I looked at The Conformist, and I saw that you could take a flag of any country and overlay it, he says. What do you have all of a sudden? You have this central focal point and a lot of negative space. When I composed throughout the film, I put that in, so you will see a lot of center composition with negative space. It changes meaning throughout the film it can be freedom, or it can be oppression. Everything can be seen in two ways.
Preproduction location scouting served as an important step for K nigswieser in helping conceive the look of the feature. For me, the most important thing is to go on location, spend time with another human being, and photograph that area with the person in it. he says. That helps me to connect with the space the chaos element. Everything that I experience in nature becomes a metaphor and kind of poetic. Natural experiences, certain reflections, certain things that happen with the light, the wind, how something moves, they will become part of a story and will move me through the scene in many ways.
Just as he had for Christopher Robin, K nigswieser desired to shoot a mix of formats for White Bird. Most of the movie is a flashback, a story being told by a grandmother (Helen Mirren) to her grandson (Bryce Gheisar), so K nigswieser's general rule of thumb was to shoot the past scenes on film and the present-day scenes on digital. There was an exception for nighttime scenes, which were shot digitally with film grain added in post
Europe Stories
11/12/2025
Dalet, a leading provider of cloud-native, end-to-end media workflow solutions, ...
05/12/2025
Every year, Spotify Wrapped offers a personalized look back at the audio that defined your year. It's a snapshot of your listening habits, designed to tell ...
05/12/2025
In 2025, Spotify's EQUAL, GLOW, and RADAR programs celebrated women, LGBTQIA , and emerging artists who turned moments into milestones. From breaking record...
05/12/2025
In our latest blog, we explain how Wi-Fi 7 rollouts can drive consumer loyalty with value-add services such as consumer cybersecurity. We also explore how this ...
05/12/2025
Friday 5 December 2025
A new Game of Thrones Tale: Official trailer for Sky Exc...
05/12/2025
Tis the season of giving once again and this year we've taken our Give Back Fridays' concept and turned it on its head.
In the autumn we were approach...
05/12/2025
Brayden Gogis doesn't remember a time when he wasn't completely fixated on games in all forms. In preschool, when they asked us to dress up as what we ...
05/12/2025
The Grinch steals the spotlight as the theme for The Late Late Toy Show 2025
Tune in tonight at 9:35pm on RT One and worldwide on RT Player
#LateLateToyShow...
05/12/2025
RT Announces New Presenters of Flagship News Programmes
New RT Six One News co-presenter Tommy Meskill
Sarah McInerney & Justin McCarthy join Morning Ir...
04/12/2025
ToolsOnAir Blackmagic Design HyperDeck Event Presets for just:in mac pro 2025 & ...
04/12/2025
ToolsOnAir AJA Ki Pro Event Presets for just:in mac pro 2025 & just:in linux
More Details:Starting with version 5.5, both just:in mac pro and just:in linux sol...
04/12/2025
Wangu Kanuri from Kenya and Godwin Asediba from Ghana are two of this years finalists for Thomsons Young Journalist of the Year Award. The pair are runners-up i...
04/12/2025
Following today's EBU Winter General Assembly in Geneva at which Israel's participation in the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest was confirmed, RT 's pos...
04/12/2025
Thursday 4 December 2025
Sky set to co-produce the story behind the world's most famous whale
Image Credit - Free Willy Keiko Foundation
Sky will co-pro...
04/12/2025
Thursday 4 December 2025
Sky Original documentary Murder at the Post Office to ...
04/12/2025
OBJECT MATRIX
OverviewObject Matrix
OM Cloud
Quattro
SWARMOverviewSwarmSingle Node Swarm
Ngenea
Pixstor
Swarm Support
Object Matrix Support
Pixstor & N...
04/12/2025
FOX Advertising Announces Plans for 2026 Upfront Presentation Annual Presentation for Advertisers to Take Place Monday, May 11 at New Location, the Historic N...
04/12/2025
The ninth series of Dancing with the Stars returns to screens in early
2026 and will be proudly sponsored by Hyundai
Filling our Sunday evenings with glitz an...
03/12/2025
ToolsOnAir Composition Builder 2025 Boilerplate
More Details: The Composition Builder 2025 application for macOS enables TV stations and Live Event broadcast...
03/12/2025
ToolsOnAr just:live pro 2025 Boilerplate
More Details: just:live pro 2025 is a Single Channel Live Production Playout solution for video and static or real-t...
03/12/2025
ToolsOnAr just:play pro 2025 Boilerplate
More Details: just:play pro 2025 is a Single Channel automated 24/7 Master Control playout solution with SD, HD and ...
03/12/2025
ToolsOnAr live:cut 2025 Boilerplate
More Details: live:cut is an option to just:in mac pro 2025 and enables multicamera production workflows for up to 16 cam...
03/12/2025
ToolsOnAir Just In Mac Lite NDI 2025 Boilerplate
More Details: The Just In Mac Lite NDI application is a streamlined media capture solution designed specific...
03/12/2025
ToolsOnAir Just In Mac Lite 2025 Boilerplate
More Details: The Just In Mac Lite application is a streamlined media capture solution designed specifically for...
03/12/2025
ToolsOnAir just:in mac pro 2025 Boilerplate
More Details: just:in mac pro is a macOS-based client-server multichannel capture solution to record SDI, HDMI, N...
03/12/2025
Tracy Bonareri Onchoke, Thomson's Young Journalist of the year 2025 is hoping the accolade will be a springboard to more cross-border collaboration between ...
03/12/2025
For the fourth time, Bad Bunny is the most-streamed Wrapped artist on Spotify gl...
03/12/2025
The wait is over. It's time to look back at the audio that defined your year with 2025 Spotify Wrapped, our annual celebration for fans, artists, creators, ...
03/12/2025
Por cuarta vez, Bad Bunny es el Top Artista Global de Wrapped en Spotify, con 19...
03/12/2025
Spotify Wrapped is back, and as always, it's powered by the billions of streams that fans around the world delivered throughout the year. From the artists w...
03/12/2025
Spotify Wrapped is the moment when hundreds of millions of fans around the world...
03/12/2025
With more than 700 million listeners around the world turning to Spotify to soundtrack their lives, it's time to look back at the audio that defined the yea...
03/12/2025
Con m s de 700 millones de oyentes en todo el mundo usando Spotify para acompa ar su d a a d a, es momento de mirar hacia atr s y ver el audio que marc el a o....
03/12/2025
From page-turning thrillers to inspiring memoirs, audiobooks are becoming a core...
03/12/2025
Com mais de 700 milh es de ouvintes em todo o mundo recorrendo ao Spotify para embalar seu dia a dia, chega o momento de revisitar o udio que marcou o ano. Nos...
03/12/2025
Spotify Wrapped celebrates the audio that defined our year, and the annual globa...
03/12/2025
Wuppertal December 3, 2025
Riedel and Haivision Join Forces to Advance Wireless Video TransmissionRiedel Communications today announced a new partnership with...
03/12/2025
Tell us a little bit about your job I am a Digital Marketing Executive working on Paid Social, PPC, and Organic Social. I joined the team in May 2025 and am enj...
03/12/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. and VIENNA - Dec. 3, 2025 - Harmonic (NASDAQ: HLIT) and Normann...
03/12/2025
S an Nollaig
Celebrate 2025's top Irish sporting stars with RT Sport Awards live from RT Studios on RT One and RT Player
RT pays tribute to Ror...
02/12/2025
eds3_5_jq(document).ready(function($) { $(#eds_sliderM519).chameleonSlider_2_1({...
02/12/2025
--
The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the International Telecommunication Unio...
02/12/2025
Harmonic's cOS Platform Will Redefine Subscribers' Quality of Experience, Lowering Churn SAN JOSE, Calif. - Dec. 2, 2025 - Harmonic (NASDAQ: HLIT) today...
02/12/2025
S an Nollaig
Hollywood blockbusters The Banshees of Inisherin, Barbie and Oppenheimer make their Irish TV debut
Tune into the classics such as Love Actual...
02/12/2025
Showcasing fresh Irish storytelling and emerging talent Storyland 2025 signals a fantastic time for Irish drama
RT and F s ireann/Screen Ireland are proud to...
01/12/2025
MANCHESTER, UK - November 2025 - Announced two days before the 30th anniversary of Oasis' debut album, Definitely Maybe, the Oasis Live '25 tour marks t...
01/12/2025
01 Dec 2025
Kyivstar and Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation Select Go...
01/12/2025
The prequel to the global hit Sky Original mob crime saga, Gomorrah' is a s...
01/12/2025
Featuring Florence Welch, Red Hot Chilli Peppers' Flea, designer Bella Freud...
01/12/2025
Fox Corporation Chief Financial Officer Steve Tomsic to Participate in Upcoming ...