Sinners’ cinematographer wants you to feel the Mississippi Delta’s vastness

Though Ryan Coogler's Sinners is crawling with vampires and steeped in supernatural mythology, the film's monsters are far from the most magical thing about it. Those aspects of Sinners' story are exciting, and they help illustrate many of its ideas about the US' legacy of racism. But in terms of showing you both the beauty and the agony of Black life in the 1930s South, there are few things in Sinners that are more powerful than its wide, majestic shots of the Mississippi Delta.

Those shots - of dirt roads that seem to stretch into infinity and sprawling cotton fields being worked by sharecroppers under the blistering sun - are part of how Sinners shows you the world its characters come from, and they're especially breathtaking when you see them on the big screen. But from each shot, you can also get a sense of the backbreaking misery that came with cultivating that land. When Coogler first reached out to Sinners' cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw (The Sun Is Also a Star, The Last Showgirl), she understood that conveying those complicated feelings would be key to realizing his vision. And after having worked together on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Coogler had no doubt th …

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