Feature Drama, USA, 2023, DCP 4K, 78’

Locarno Official Selection - Concorso Cineasti del presente
(trailer)


“The audio design by Andrew Siedenburg and Nikolay Antonov is thus an inescapably crucial part of the film’s impact. “

Screen Daily, Family Portrait: Locarno Review

“Indeed, there’s a surreal side to Family Portrait, although the film also feels hyperreal in places, with sound designers Nikolay Antonov and Andrew Siedenburg turning up the mix at key moments. When leaves rustle, it’s like a tidal wave suddenly washing over the land. At other times the sound almost drops out completely, plunging the viewer into a troubling void.”

Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter


Press:

https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/family-portrait-locarno-review/5184734.article
https://inreviewonline.com/2023/08/11/family-portrait/
https://icsfilm.org/reviews/locarno-2023-review-family-portrait-lucy-kerr/
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/family-portrait-review-lucy-kerr-1235559688/
https://universalcinema.ca/family-portrait-kerrs-dazzling-frame-on-the-screen/
https://journeyintocinema.com/family-portrait-review/


Set at the dawn of Covid-19, Family Portrait follows a big Texas family on a morning when they have planned a picture for their annual Christmas Card at their Guadalupe river property. As the film progresses, one of the daughters, Katy, and her Polish boyfriend, Olek, become increasingly anxious to take the picture, as they must head to the airport afterwards. As Katy seeks to find her suddenly vanished mother and assemble her family for the photo op, her family, spiraling into idle conversations, dispersed amongst the sprawling property, appear to resist any attempt to gather. Historically, family portraits exist as an endeavor to immortalize the family institution, yet, according to Roland Barthes, in this futile attempt one also realizes one's mortality. In Family Portrait, as the family falls away from one another and as Katy loses herself, it is as if death is what this family cannot come to terms with.

Written and Directed by: Lucy Kerr
Producer: NSF, Megan Pickrell
Director of Photography: Lidia Nikonova
Editor: Karlis Bergs
Directorial Advisor: Rob Rice
Production Sound Mixer: Andrew Siedenburg
Sound Design: Andrew Siedenburg, Nikolay Antonov
Re-recording Mixer: Nikolay Antonov
Featuring: Deragh Campbell, Chris Galust, Rachel Alig, Katie Folger, Robert Salas, Silvana Jakich, Veronica Cinibulk, Ed Hattaway, Vanessa Cetodal, Christian Huey, Les Weiler, David McGuff, Miriam Spumpkin, and Luke, Gray, Rhett, and Magnolia Picarazzi



Site of Passage (experimental fiction, 16mm, color, sound, 7 min, 2022)

FIDMarseille 2022, Reykjavic International Film Festival 2022

Hushed voices announce a girl’s death. Kneeling around the corpse, the teenage girls stare at her. Again, they whisper, chanting in unison “light as a feather, stiff as a board”, a magic formula from the depths of time, as they lift the body, which almost levitates. We’re in the sitting room of a house, dimly lit, candles dotted around everywhere, pop-corn spilt on the couch. Right from the start, with its motifs and set, Site of Passage evokes those teen movies portraying young witches, and horror films from the 1980s and 90s where the sleepover turns into a nightmare. In Crashing Waves (FID 2021) Lucy Kerr made the reverse side of images from genre cinema her subject matter. In this film, she applies herself to reduction, stripping her set of any horror and retaining only the invisible trace of it, suggesting it in a brief, pared-down gesture. There are no morbid tales here, just the series of mysterious motions from the six teenage girls with their angelic faces. The light- heartedness of the games they play offers a counterpoint to the fantasised horror despite a lingering and disturbing strangeness. To the creaking of the floorboards caused by girls’ movements, the minimalist sound treatment adds a continuous background noise of the film equipment, a ghostly presence in the middle of the room. A final image shows them collapsing and getting up again, supporting each other in a game of balance and counterbalance. Kerr offers a choreographic variation suspended in time, representing adolescent sisterhood in the ritualised union, like in the final scene, where the pastel colours blend into the ballet of intertwined bodies, which, in this site of passage, seem to become one.
(Louise Martin Papasian)

Director and Editor: Lucy Kerr
Director of Photography: Alexey Kurbatov
Sound Designer and Colorist: Andrew Siedenburg
Featuring: Reese Taylor, Hannah Lee, Madelin Wilson, Loren Hansen, Presley Alexander, Rachel Withers



Triangle Walks with OKTA Collective - Audiowalk expanded with augmented reality, 17:43 min Germany/USA

The work envelopes viewers in a three dimensional sensorial experience of dynamic relationships between humans and different species. Inspired by feminist posthumanism author Rosi Braidotti and Black science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, the augmented audio walk unfolds the perspective of “the other”–one that is a composite organism consisting of multiple entities. By refusing the often-troubling anthropocentric perspective and acknowledging the urgency of environmental degradations, the augmented audio guide is led by a symbiotic plant-like creature as they trace a speculative fiction. The fiction illustrates the state of Earth after devastating floods and the growth of new symbiotic systems and multispecies modes of care in this post-apocalyptic world.

This project was originally presented within the post-industrial landscape of Zollverein as part of the NEW NOW Conference, a space originally constructed as an anchor point for the European Route of Industrial Culture. Triangle Walks is adaptable to any kind of space in which listeners/viewers may walk.

Produced by: Dovile Aleksaite, Lucy Kerr, and Alisi Telengut
Sound Design: Andrew Siedenburg