Shabier Kirchner

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Shabier Kirchner is an Antiguan cinematographer and director who has worked in feature and short filmmaking, commercials, music videos, and television. His work on Steve McQueen’s five-part anthology series Small Axe (2020) earned him a BAFTA award, an Emmy nomination, and numerous nominations and wins at Critic Awards. Kirchner has also received recognition for his cinematography and collaboration with Celine Song on her first two features, Past Lives (2023) and The Materialists (2025), as well as his short film, Dadli (2018).

Kirchner often speaks of his style seeking a “naturalism.” As opposed to a narrow set of film practices centered on a certain level of film grain, coloring, or camera positionings and movements, naturalism for Kirchner names an intimacy with characters, stories, and environments that demands adaptive and intuitive practice (See Giardina [2023], Giardina [2021], Mutter, and Hunt). As Celine Song said in an interview with The Film Stage, “[Kirchner’s work is] always going to be about making something that is alive and makes you feel something. He never makes a dead image.” Kirchner builds “an emotional map” (Giardina [2023]) as a guide for the characters and their world, so that he is “responding to the environment and listening to what the film want[s] to be” (Prince).

This became the foundation of his collaboration with Steve McQueen on Small Axe where Kirchner was tasked with trusting his instincts and his feelings on the scene and characters to seek what the environment is asking for. Speaking with the Hollywood Reporter, Kirchner said, “Steve is very much about responding to the actors — setting up an environment and then letting the actors find where they need to be, and the camera will be in conversation with that” (Giardina [2021]). This required McQueen and Kirchner to treat each film as uniquely its own work. Mangrove was shot on 2-perf 35mm to capture the tone and color of the 1970s, “the patina of the era” (Giardina [2021]), and to hold both the richness of the collective and the intimacy of the close up, whereas Red White and Blue used 3-perf 35mm but with a Cooke S4 lens to give a “sharper and cleaner look” from Mangrove (“DP Shabier Kirchner used Kodak”). And most strikingly, for Lovers Rock, digital cameras were necessary so that Kirchner, manning the handheld camera, could freely move through and with the dancing, grinding, and swaying bodies of the house party,  with the camera becoming “a person at the party, a type of person that’s in love, a person that is lonely, a person that is anxious” (Giardina [2021]). Kirchner’s film form breathes with the film, its characters, and their world.

This is a practice of storytelling. Not bound to a narrative, but to how stories are told and how stories demand to be told. And for Kirchner, it is an outcome of Antigua. As he told Criterion, “Antigua had no film industry, so we taught ourselves, and there were no rules. … With the absence of commercial expectations, it was just freedom, and those early ideas I had still remain foundations in my approach to storytelling” (Bartlett). Kirchner bristles at the assumptions of Western storytelling, and the formal practices that come with it—wanting “to break down the way we’ve been taught to tell stories” (Bartlett). Take his short film Dadli (2018). What began as film tests to reacquaint himself with shooting on 16mm for Benh Zeitlin’s Wendy (2020), became a rich ode to his home island of Antigua, to the vitality of its people, its history, and its future (Uszerowicz). The film’s guide is not a narrative but the happenstance that a young boy, Tiquan, kept reappearing in the footage. In seeing him, Kirchner asked his friends to interview him and let him narrate his and the island’s lives. Not forcing a style or form, but instead, allowing the island and its people to shape and lead what the film is—the story it tells. “For me,” Kirchner says, “this isn’t cinema, this is ancestral. In a time when our histories are fading, I want to be able to keep making choices that preserve that in any way possible” (“25 New Faces”).

SELECTED WORKS

Cinematographer

Materialists (2025), dir. Celine Song

Get Millie Black (2024), dir. Tanya Hamilton, ep. 1 and 2

Coldplay: All My Love (2024), dir. Spike Jonze and Mary Wigmore

Past Lives (2023), dir. Celine Song

Daron, Daron Colbert (2022), dir. Kevin Edward Steen

Lizard (2021), dir. Akinola Davies

Ayia: Easy (2020), dir. Salomon Ligthelm

Jamestowne (2020), dir. Nick Grau

Small Axe (2020), dir. Steve McQueen

Bull (2019), dir. Annie Silverstein

Dadli (2018), dir. Shabier Kirchner

Leaving Hope (2018), dir. Caspar Newbolt

Only You (2018), dir. Harry Wootliff

Skate Kitchen (2018), dir. Crystal Moselle

Sollers Point (2017), dir. Matthew Porterfield

The One Day (2016), dir. Crystal Moselle

We’ve Forgotten More Than We Ever Knew (2016), dir. Thomas Woodrow

Coke White, Starlight (2015), dir. Tristan Patterson

I Am Selma (2015), dir. Yossera Bouchtia

Throuple (2015), dir. Phillips Payson

Wander (2014), dir. Diego Siragna

Ugly (2011), Diego Siragna

Memoirs of the Blue (2010), dir. Luke Hansen-MacDonald

Director

Dadli (2018)

SELECTED INTERVIEWS

Friedman, Illya, host. “Bonus Episode: Past Lives cinematographer Shabier Kirchner.” The Cinematography Podcast, February 20, 2024. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-cinematography-podcast/id812436884

Marathe, Parth and Trent Algayer, hosts. “Past Lives (2023) with Cinematographer Shabier Kirchner Part 2.” Craft Services, February 11, 2024. https://shows.acast.com/craft-services/episodes/65c8446994623a00160b03d8

Marathe, Parth and Trent Algayer, hosts. “Past Lives (2023) with Cinematographer Shabier Kirchner Part 1.” Craft Services, February 4, 2024. https://shows.acast.com/craft-services/episodes/65b5d415c88e880016c27d0f

Giardina, Carolyn. “‘We Wanted to Paint With the Light and Write With the Camera’: The THR Cinematographer Roundtable.” The Hollywood Reporter, December 19, 2023. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/cinematographer-roundtable-barbie-oppenheimer-john-wick-1235712400/

Prince, Ron. “Dates with Destiny: Shabier Kirchner Past Lives.” Cinematography World 17, September/October 2023. https://www.cinematography.world/shabier-kirchner-past-lives/

ScreenSkills. “A conversation with Bafta-winning cinematographer Shabier Kirchner.” YouTube, June 28, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJIvHAY1CJs

“Interview: Shabier Kirchner Award-winning Antiguan cinematographer.” Antigua and Barbuda The Citizen, April 30, 2021. https://issuu.com/thecitizenantiguabarbuda/docs/antiguabarbudathecitizen102021

BAFTA Guru. “Small Axe Q&A with Steve McQueen, Rochenda Sandall, Michael Ward & More.” YouTube, February 17, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tm3WTvJf_N4

Giardina, Carolyn. “‘Small Axe’ Cinematographer Steps Into Spotlight With Steve McQueen’s Film Series.” The Hollywood Reporter, January 5, 2021. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/small-axe-cinematographer-steps-into-spotlight-with-steve-mcqueens-film-series-4110271/

Mutter, Zoe. “The Truth Shall Prevail: Shabier Kirchner, Small Axe: Mangrove.” British Cinematographer, January 2021. https://britishcinematographer.co.uk/shabier-kirchner-small-axe-mangrove/

“DP Shabier Kirchner used Kodak 35mm & 16mm film for Steve McQueen’s acclaimed 'Small Axe' anthology, including the feature-length 'Mangrove.'” Kodak, December 22, 2020. https://www.kodak.com/en/motion/blog-post/small-axe-anthology/

Hunt, Aaron. “Shabier Kirchner on shooting Steve McQueen’s Small Axe.” Sight and Sound, December 1, 2020. https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/interviews/shabier-kirchner-cinematographer-small-axe-steve-mcqueen

Bartlett, Penelope. “Shabier Kirchner’s Love Letter to a Vanishing Antigua.” The Current, November 17, 2020. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7183-shabier-kirchner-s-love-letter-to-a-vanishing-antigua

Film at Lincoln Center. “NYFF58 Talk: The Making of Small Axe.” YouTube, October 21, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXkkNyq40aI

“25 New Faces of Independent Film 2020: Shabier Kirchner.” Filmmaker Magazine, 2020. https://filmmakermagazine.com/people/shabier-kirchner/.

Ali, Jonathan. “Q&A with Shabier Kirchner.” Caribbean Beat 156, March/April 2019. https://www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-156-qa-with-shabier-kirchner

Uszerowicz, Monica. “‘I Only Want to Tell Caribbean Stories’: DP Shabier Kirchner on His Directorial Debut, the Short Film Dadli.” Filmmaker Magazine, September 27, 2018. https://filmmakermagazine.com/106081-i-only-want-to-tell-caribbean-stories-dp-shabier-kirchner-on-his-director-debut-the-short-film-dadli/

IN CONVERSATION

Kirchner, Shabier. “Eye Piece: DP Shabier Kirchner Lensed Skate Kitchen on Wheels, But Didn’t Skate Through His Demanding Shoot.” Movie Maker, Spring 2018. https://www.moviemaker.com/shabier-kirchner-skate-kitchen-eye-piece/