The QFS Mission

North by Northwest (1959) Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. A visual approximation of being completely alone in the world, surrounded by uncertainty.

In March 2020, I was thrust into the primary leadership position of an unpermitted at-home daycare and preschool at our home in Los Angeles, California. Partially state funded, it met with moderate success at first. But within a few weeks, a downward spiral began as it became clear that the staff was completely unqualified and unmotivated to run both the daycare and the preschool. The staff was also likely uncredentialed. The students sensed this dearth of leadership and soon revolted. And then napped. The school’s technology failed repeatedly; the IT department was also underqualified and often times inebriated. The custodial staff was overwhelmed and unable to address the most basic of facility concerns – they, too, were likely inebriated. 

Of course, all of those staff positions were just one person: this guy. I, like most people in the world, all of a sudden had to do things we don’t usually have to do. In between making sure my preschooler understood the workings of his online correspondence course and preventing our 18-month-old from sharpening a building block into a shiv, I had vague memories of having once been a filmmaker.

I was once a filmmaker. In that long ago halcyon time of February 2020, I had just wrapped … something. I was once a filmmaker. I had made my own films – documentaries, short films, wrote screenplays, and directed major network and cable television. I was once a filmmaker.

I snapped out of that haze of memory, probably due to a smoke dectector sounding from the kitchen. But the memory lingered, as if from a David Lynch film, dream-like. With the film industry shuttered indefinitely and no clear resolution on the horizon, I soon realized that if I didn’t want a part of me to disappear I needed to hold on to something to keep me alive. Something to remind myself that I was one of the lucky ones who got to making a living by bringing visions to life, to work in an industry that crafts dreams. I needed to return to my first love to keep myself living and thriving.

I needed to watch movies. And I needed to talk about movies with other people.

Ever since I finished graduate film school two decades ago, I have hosted film clubs (or societies, if you will) in order to see movies together and discuss in a sort of informal film studies as a way to continue to expand our collective knowledge of motion pictures. Over those two decades of working as a writer and director in LA, I developed a cohort of fellow filmmakers and collaborators whose work I admired and whose opinions I trusted and valued on matters of art, literature, culture and of course film. To formalize our societies, I merely picked a time, a movie, and a venue, and people showed up.

The first group began as a small gathering in my little apartment - SWOCOMM, or “Sharat’s Wednesday Overlooked Classics Once a Month Movie” if you aren’t into the whole brevity thing. It required renting a movie from Blockbuster Video or mailed to me by Netflix. This group eventually became “Wednesday Night Film Society” in which we did something similar but watched movies in the theater. And thus, I helped usher in the demise of Blockbuster Video.

So when pestilance descended and closed the theaters across the land in 2020, I did what all of us did - discover how to use Zoom (which was once called Skype which in turn was once called a videophone) and looked at other people’s digital faces as we talked about the end of days. But also, I decided to do the same for movies.

Thus sprang forth Quarantine FIlm Society. I assigned Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000) in April 2020 to the group for them to watch in the relative safety of their homes and join us to discuss. Since we could do so, I expanded the membership to collaborators in other cities with a few non-filmmakers thrown in — including a law clerk, a journalist, a political scientist, a social worker, an educator, a doctor and also my father. People who in the past spent countless hours discussing movies, literature, and art in a constructive way and who had an influence on me, personally, as an artist.

That first conversation in early May 2020 was so lively and invigorating that, given what was suddenly happening to all of us in the world, I figured I might as well do it again the next week. Soon I realized there would be nothing to stop me from doing this every week as a way to maintain some level of sanity and to continue to remind myself of myself. And so we did. For the next three years and counting.

QFS was conceived of as a forum to dicuss the selected film, first and foremost. But it also became a way to stay connected when we couldn’t leave our homes, to talk about how to stay safe from the virus (turned out having a doctor who happened to be a pulmonologist on the chat was a good idea) and also about what was going on in the world. If you recall, 2020 was extremely … eventful.

Half a year later, the film industry returned to work under strict safety protocols and I was, thankfully, hired again to direct episodic television. QFS continued regularly, with a few gaps here and there whenever I had to work on set. People would join our weekly chats whenever they could and we always have a solid turnout and a robust discussion about the week’s selection even as pandemic era lockdowns and restrictions eased.

Selections are high, middle, and low brow by design. Current releases, classics, and overlooked works from the past. They span filmmaking eras, genres, decades, and countries. I intend to keep selecting films from around the world but with a primary focus on American filmmaking both contemporary and historic. The invitations that are emailed to the QFS members are the film entries you see here. They are not written purely for filmmakers or for people who read and write deep film criticism and analysis. They began as a casual rationale for why I selected a given film that week and the writing has remained in a conversational style, which continues on this site here.

This site is, hopefully, the next evolution of our QFS group. The site’s mission is to allow you, friendly visitor, to join in the conversation. I’ll share with you what our selection of the week is by posting the emailed invitation to our members. After the QFS group has discussed the film, I’ll attempt to recap some of the insights of our conversation. If so moved, you will be able to contribute to the conversation by watching the film and offering your thoughts.

If nothing else, I hope this site will be a trusted source for people to select films for their own viewing. I intend to go back and post as an archive all the films we’ve viewed and discussed from 2020 up to the present day, though it might take some time. I intend to include what was going on in the world back then, as well, as a sort of chronicle of those particularly uncertain times.

The shorter way of saying all of that is - I’ve loved hosting Quarantine Film Society with my friends and colleagues over the last three years. This is a tiny way to share it with you all. And while most of us are filmmakers, we’re not film scholars. What we most have in common is that we all derive joy and meaning from watching a great story unfold on a screen in front of us. I’m looking forward to sharing with those of you who feel the same way.