Zeiss Supreme Primes Power Run Amok's Sundance Debut

Sundance-premiering "Run Amok" offers an expressive, genre-blending portrait of contemporary teenage life, complete with musical set-pieces. Cinematographer Shachar Langlev, collaborating with writer-director NB Mager, set out to centre both the characters and the young performers themselves, choosing Zeiss Supreme Primes on ARRI Alexa Mini LF to build a visual language as nuanced as the story.

The film follows Meg, a solitary teenager who channels grief and activism into an ambitious musical about a shooting at her high school. Produced by Tandem Pictures (Julie Christeas), it introduces Alyssa Marvin and features an ensemble including Patrick Wilson, Margaret Cho, Sophia Torres, Elizabeth Marvel and Molly Ringwald. A clear visual divide between the teenagers and the adults runs throughout, a conceptual standoff echoed in the cinematography.

Working across two Mini LF bodies on a 22-day shoot, Langlev prioritised consistency. He leaned on Zeiss Supreme Primes—favouring the 135mm for close-ups and the 21mm and 35mm for wider frames—and relied on the set's shared characteristics of look, weight, diameter and T-stop to maintain coherence from shot to shot.

"What I love about the Zeiss Supreme lens is how they deal with what's not in focus," Langlev elaborates. He added: "The Zeiss Supreme has a supreme fall-off. It's just organic." In a film where camera position and plane of focus function as storytelling devices in the push-pull between teens and adults, that rendering of the out-of-focus image proved essential. Langlev said: "Cinema is a two-dimensional world, but we shoot to look and feel three-dimensional. The balance of what is in focus lets us achieve this."

After its 2026 Sundance bow in the US Narrative Competition, Run Amok continues on the festival circuit. It will open the Lower East Side Film Festival on 30 April. Langlev discusses the project in depth in his Zeiss Conversation on YouTube (
www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-QlFoOkUx0). Details on the LESFF screening are available via the festival's website (www.lesfilmfestival.com/program/opening-night-film-2026).