Ryan Coogler on ‘Sinners’ DP Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s Passionate Approach to Cinematography

On December 4, the IndieWire Honors Winter 2025 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best films. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the filmmakers, artisans, and performers behind films well worth toasting. In the days leading up to the Los Angeles event, IndieWire is showcasing their work with new interviews and tributes from their peers.

Honoring our Impact Award winner Autumn Durald Arkapaw, director Ryan Coogler — himself a previous IndieWire Honors honoree — talks about his collaboration with the cinematographer and what she brought to “Sinners.” As told to Jim Hemphill.

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Autumn is incredibly loyal and has a passion for storytelling. When she is working, she is intensely dedicated to the integrity of the image and its capacity to uphold the story and the work of all of the artists involved. She is passionate about everyone’s role and takes her job of presenting that work with lighting, framing, and camera movement with a great sense of responsibility.

Autumn brought her unique technical skillset and emotional point of view on the lighting, rich skin tones and density of the image, and a desire to expand our concept of what qualifies as EPIC characters and storytelling in American narratives. She would frame the wide shot that revealed Sammie’s sleeping younger siblings with the same rigor and technical consideration that she would an epic hero reveal of the Smokestack twins. She would approach intimacy scenes with the same eye for detail as our action set pieces, but it would also be in communication with the actors that they would be cared for by the lighting and the framing. Even in moments of vulnerability, they knew Autumn had their back.

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