James N. Kienitz Wilkins

An epic story about a group of American libertarians told in a unique manner, as both an audio performance and an experimental film. The piece features an ensemble cast of 15 actors, each individually recorded and then edited together sentence-by-sentence to create a spoken word experience that activates the power of the mind’s eye. As the drama unfolds, the image slowly transitions from pure black to blinding white throughout the duration of the film.

Public Hearing is the verbatim re-performance of a rural American town meeting from a transcript downloaded as publicly available information. Shot entirely in cinematic close-up on black-and-white 16mm film, a cast of actors and non-actors read between the lines in an ironic debate over the replacement of an existing Wal-Mart with a super Wal-Mart.

Upcoming project from the director

A failed filmmaker turned single dad tries to make a living while retaining his sense of self, in James N. Kienitz Wilkins’ experimental 3D-rendered home renovation comedy, which doubles as an acidic treatise on working conditions for the contemporary creative.

In the aftermath of a conspiracy-minded father’s sudden death, his daughter inherits his patent for an experimental healing device.

A procession of black-and-silvery-white stills of New England’s Androscoggin River unspools alongside an anxious monologue on movies, memory, and minor history.

Special Features is an apparent interview with three highlights. Presented as a lo-fi fragment from a forgotten video production, an interviewee interacts with an interviewer, recounting a special experience at once unique and shared.

An ode to movie culture and its beguiling hold on our imagination, modeled on an actual legal deposition, and accompanied by a procession of 35mm publicity stills from studio press kits.

A ghostly militia of lookalikes gradually lose their menace.

In this kaleidoscopic portrait, a screenwriter, an actor, an urban shaman, and the director himself contend with the everyday annoyances that fill the life of an artist.

Composer and filmmaker Christian von Borries' new film Desert of the real visits these contemporary wastelands. In a rich collage of acted scenes and documentary footage, he extends the metaphor of the wasteland to today's medial reality. At the heart of so many holographic simulations and replicas, in a world custom-made for selfie and instagram tweets, he reveals emptiness and potential violence. (David Riff) The only way to trace the distinction between the semblance and the Real is, precisely, to STAGE it in a fake spectacle.

A semi-biographical fiction inspired by his father’s work at one of Kodak’s first processing labs, Wilson’s speculative gloss on the evolution of photochemical science entwines multiple perspectives and personas. Co-written by James N. Kienitz Wilkins, Kodak imagines a dialogue between a blind, mentally unstable former film technician and George Eastman himself, recordings of whom play out over a procession of photographs, home video footage, vintage Kodak ads, and animations.

A young man disappears amid talk of violence and demagoguery, leaving behind an obscure cache of letters, postcards, and notebooks.

The movie arose out of our sparetime as teenagers with fresh driver’s licenses and cobbled-together camera gear, wandering around a tired and honestly pretty grim post-industrial mill community, reinforced with after-hours access to the darkroom at the Sun Journal (where Aaron’s dad was the visuals editor), and some half-formed education in the techniques of Robert Frank, Frederick Wiseman, Dogme 95, Italian neorealism, pre-Obama Shepard Fairey, plus whatever culture pushed its way through the creaky pipes of low-bandwidth dial-up internet, or was smuggled up the actual superhighway of I-95 from Boston and eventually New York, or mailed first class via United States Postal Service from a burgeoning Netflix in those classic matte red envelopes, as valuable and rare as cash sent from China. [...] Somehow we negotiated access to a Canon XL1 3-CCD MiniDV camera and shotgun mic from the local public access station, in exchange for taping the high school graduation we didn’t participate in.

Mediums is a medium-length film, shot all in medium shots.

An anonymous and mediated testimonial about one man's dangerous dream.

In the children’s book Best Busy Year Ever by Richard Scarry, the hustle and bustle of a city is captured through colorful illustrations. Using his performative storytelling narration, Wilkins questions contemporary social issues with understated ironic wit.

This Action Lies is a movie about the limits of observation, about staring very hard at something while listening to something else. It is a paranoid polyphonic apology of a simple act: offering three perspectives of an object that may not exist in a room that cannot exist, while at the mercy of a mistrustful monologue. In other words, a defense of cinema. This project expands ideas introduced in one of Kienitz Wilkins’ previous films, Indefinite Pitch (2016), and is similarly voice-driven, using an extended monologue to analyze a common and underappreciated commercial product, elevating it to the status of an almost Platonic form.

A young couple is shaken by a seemingly fraudulent yet unprovable act that strikes to the core of their cultural pretensions.