Courtney Stephens

The daring experimenter Dr. John C. Lilly dedicated his life to radical self-investigation and unlocking the mysteries of consciousness and communication. “My body is my laboratory” was the motto, and his research on the language of dolphins and whales – as well as psychedelics and sensory deprivation – assured his own cult status in 20th-century pop culture as the basis for Ken Russel’s Altered States and Mike Nichols’s The Day of the Dolphin. Directors Michael Almareyda and Courtney Stephens, along with narrator Chloë Sevigny, explore the life of a determined scientist and his experiments into the psychonautical unknown.

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

In early 2020, MUTA - International Festival of Audiovisual Appropriation and Cine Íntimo rescued and digitised a Peruvian archive of orphaned 8mm and Super 8 home movies. With the aim of restoring these lost memories, we sent the images around the world. This omnibus film is the result of the intervention of this material, by 14 experimental filmmakers. Fourteen perspectives and ways of experiencing appropriation. Fourteen variations on the intimate.

The bleached palette and home-movie aesthetics of Super 8 footage provide the image track for this testimonial about an illegal abortion in Mexico City in the 1960s, delivered in voiceover by the filmmaker’s mother. In its account of this intimate and disorienting memory, Lesser Choices summons a time of profound uncertainty—a moment from an era without rights—and offers a warning to the present.

After discovering a set of cryptic microcassettes in her new home, Cas is drawn into a meditative mystery of environmental sound and experimental music.

A pretentious underground filmmaker struggles with his masterpiece while a scuzzy punkoid chick tries to keep her band from fading into obscurity.

Stricken with an undisclosed illness, the narrator of this reflexive work draws evocative parallels between the darkened hulls of an industrial ocean liner and an increasingly disorienting mental state. Courtney Stephens was inspired by the nautical imagery and turbulent inner monologue of Hannah Weiner’s maritime code poems.

A portrait of the artist and piano tuner Jerome Ellis, and a meditation on intervals in music, nature and language. The act of tuning harmonizes the world, at least temporarily, but time brings suffering and instability.