Courtney Stephens
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“America is Desperate for a Narrative”: Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez on Invention
Following a decade of work in experimental and documentary cinema, director Courtney Stephens steps into fiction for the first time with Invention, a remarkably resourceful microbudget drama that nonetheless resists strict categorization. Starring and co-conceived by Callie Hernandez, the film draws upon the actress’s real-life relationship with her late father, a medical doctor turned small-time huckster who made a name for himself on local television talk shows and public access programs in the ’90s and 2000s. In this fictionalized telling set in the Berkshires, VHS footage of those TV appearances weave through a story in which Hernandez, playing a version […]
by Jordan Cronk on Aug 15, 2024 -
Rubbing Shoulders with Beauty: After a Pandemic Year, Acts of Looking at the Camden International Film Festival
In La panthère des neiges/The Velvet Queen, a feature directed by Marie Amiguet based on an idea by renowned wildlife photographer Vincent Munier, French writer and traveler Sylvain Tesson accompanies Munier to the Sanjiangyuan nature reserve on the Tibetan plateau, hoping for a glimpse of the elusive snow leopard. “Not everything is made for the human eye,” Tesson says at one point, a sentiment that is both a lesson in filmic observation—searching for the unseen in order to record it—as well as a commentary on the responsibilities inherent in that act. In the beginning of his expedition with Munier, Tesson […]
by Pamela Cohn on Oct 11, 2021 -
Watch: Experimental Filmmakers Imaginatively Respond to the Pandemic in Cinema-19
In the brisk, 43-minute anthology film, Cinema-19, a group of experimental filmmakers respond to the coronavirus pandemic with diverse and imaginative results. The films are all 190 seconds long and, say the curator/organizers, filmmakers Usama Alshaibi and Adam Sekuler, “do not attempt to summarize the pandemic, but instead focus on the personal, the political, the sensual, the distant, the abstract, and the absurd.” Highlights include Courtney Stephen‘s poetic essay film on irises, hundreds of which she encountered on walks in the five-mile radius she and her mother were confined to during quarantine. (“This is a trick,” she says in voiceover. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 25, 2020
