“You have to always shoot from your heart”: an audience with history-making Sinners cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw 

Autumn Durald Arkapaw sees the bigger picture. The director of photography’s most recent work, capturing the grand, rich landscapes of the Mississippi Delta in Sinners (2025), has shepherded a new age of female cinematography. With Ryan Coogler’s film, she became the only woman to shoot a feature on IMAX 65mm and Ultra Panavision 70, and is the sole female cinematographer of colour to be nominated for an Academy Award. Arkapaw’s breadth of accolades attracts attention, luring an excitable crowd of young film enthusiasts to BFI Southbank on an otherwise unassuming wet Thursday afternoon for a masterclass with the accomplished DP. 

As the BFI Film Academy alumni chatter in anticipation, a pair of girls nearest to me overpower the background jazz playing from the sound system, discussing over-the-shoulder shots while the camerawoman finishes setting up. The ambience is harmonious. The lights dim, the crowd falls silent, and necks crane, awaiting a first glimpse of Arkapaw.  

Film programmer and moderator Khara Linton-Salmon begins by encapsulating Arkapaw’s work across “indie darlings, major blockbusters and era-defining cinematic experiences”, which includes titles such as Palo Alto (2013), Mainstream (2020) and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022). The thread linking Arkapaw’s filmography is her penchant for working with friends. “It’s when I do my best work”, she says, emphasising the importance of finding a community “looking to tell the same story that you are”.

It was through a mutual friend from the American Film Institute shortly after graduation that Arkapaw met long-time collaborator Gia Coppola, who needed a camera test. “It was freeing to be in control so early on”, she recalls fondly, reflecting on a time before the external pressures of management and knowing there was money on the line, when the two could run around shooting stuff “that was pretty…that really inspired us”. 

Arkapaw is prepared to stand behind her collaborators and their shared vision, recalling an instance on The Last Showgirl (2024) – her third feature with Coppola – where she put her foot down. “I’m not going to shoot it if it’s not on film,” she asserted when there was studio pushback; this was something Coppola wanted, something she felt was important, and Arkapaw wasn’t going to back down.

It is this self-conviction and spirited dedication to her craft, reflected in her assured tone and manner, that the alumni singled out as particularly inspiring after the event. “I don’t like when [creativity] lives in a place of fear, there’s no place for it in filmmaking… you have to be brave.”

Arkapaw carries this ethos into her professional relationship with Coogler – whom she previously worked with on the Black Panther sequel – saying that whenever the auteur calls her with a new idea, “it’s always going to be something we’ve never done before, and we’re going to explore it.” This is the zone she likes to be in artistically. Having never worked with large format before until Sinners, she reasoned that you must dare and play. Being an artist, she declares, is about getting into that “zone of creativity where you can be vulnerable”, leaving traces of yourself within the form.  

So often, she notes, young creatives become weighed down by technicality, entrapped by perfectionism. “You have to just always shoot from your heart”, she stresses. What Arkapaw finds particularly grating is that many cinematographers overexpose dark and brown skin, under the impression that it requires more light. But there’s a striking allure to deeper complexions, and as a Filipina cinematographer of Afro-Creole descent, she “[wants] that beauty to sing, [and] it tends to be in the shadows”, right on the edge. 

Arkapaw shoots and lights guided by emotion. She comments on the profoundly personal relationship of working with celluloid; only she knows how much she’s exposed the negatives. With film, “you feel untethered”, the secluded intimacy of the ritualistic process verges on spiritual. During the audience Q&A segment, an attendee remarked on the transcendent quality of her camerawork, likening the crane to the Holy Ghost as it floats across the church in Arkapaw’s favourite Sinners scene, where Sammie returns home following the Club Juke massacre. She modestly credits editor Michael P. Shawver for capturing its ethereal movement. The symbiotic relationship between departments is made possible by the synchronicity of her camera crew, with whom she has a long-standing relationship and who she trusts to support her as she ensures she executes big ideas skilfully in respect for all the women that came before and after her. “I [want] to make them proud.”  

Arkapaw has amassed a fan club of young women of colour within film, one of whom is Arabella. “On behalf of a lot of young Filipino filmmakers in the UK, you’re killing the game,” she says, later revealing that she deeply admires Arkapaw’s trail-blaizing progression through the ranks. As Arabella contemplates navigating the hive of young women that have suddenly surrounded the DP post-masterclass, she is the mirror image of an anecdote Autumn disclosed earlier of when she was still a student and not yet the poised woman that sat before us. Arkapaw remembers when she, too, had to gather the courage to speak to Filipino-American cinematographer Matthew Libatique – whom she now considers a friend – after a film event just like this one. 

The respect that Arkapaw’s distinctive cinematography cultivates had drawn young cinephiles down to BFI Southbank from as far as York and Liverpool. And as her young supporters wait to see if she will become the first woman to take home an Oscar for Best Cinematography, it’s apparent that, regardless, Autumn Durald Arkapaw has motivated a wave of aspiring female cinematographers of colour, who look at her and see a reflection, and share her ambition to find the beauty within the edge. 

Want a hands-on introduction to professional camera, lighting and grip? Sign up to the free BFI Film Academy Camera and Lighting Specialist Course taking place 6 to 13 April 2026 in Lincoln.