July 2024

A Balancing Act: Solo Production Offers Creative Freedom and Challenges

It was Mathew Cheung’s first night with his host family in Bonn, Germany, and he was looking for a documentary subject. He was taking part in Loyola Marymount University’s (LMU) semester-long International Documentary Program, for which a group of third-year undergraduate students were sent to Bonn with the task of making a short-from doc. “I’m big into rock climbing and slacklining a bit, so I told my host family about these interests,” Cheung recounts. “And they pulled out a video on their phone of a guy slacklining from the Eiffel Tower.” The subject was Nathan Paulin, the internationally known French tightrope-walker, and Cheung’s host family happened to know his wife. That’s how it started, and the film Matthew Cheung would make...more