Stephen Wardell
2021Uriah Plays the Alien
Stephen Wardell
A portrait of my brother Uriah becomes a sci-fi fantasy about queerness, alienation, and disability. Using reenactment to address the problematic, it proposes a way of healing and moving forward out of a present moment of rejection, into radical acceptance. "About ten minutes into shooting, my siblings decided they didn't want to make a movie anymore. I had to placate them with Cheetos and donuts. Even with snacks, total insurgency ensued after about two hours. I thought the shoot was a failure until I showed the footage to someone a month later. Then I realized that a movie can be as simple as a document of failing." -Stephen Wardell
Uriah Plays the Alien
Psychic Meat
Stephen Wardell
"The film is a diary and act of bearing witness in which Wardell tells of his father's artificial heart valve, the industrial farming industry that both provided the tissue for it and arguably hastened its necessity, and their somewhat distant father-son relationship. Wardell hand-developed this film in salt which resulted in a shimmering pock-marked effect on the celluloid which emphasises the film's own materiality and physical precarity in line with the earthbound fleshiness of the maker's voiceover narrative. However, the salt’s implications as a curing agent for meat and the way its visual impact brings together threads of preservation – of his father's life, of their mutual love, of the detachment they have felt for years – and the latent imagery of these things hanging and curing over time, becomes quietly overwhelming." - Ben Nicholson, Alt/Kino
Psychic Meat
Lillian Finds the Zombies
Stephen Wardell
Zombies return due to pending matters yet to be settled: in this case, issues related to land exploitation and family relationships through time. Set in Negaunee, Michigan, filmed outdoors with a great sense of playfulness, the movie is narrated in the present while questioning the past and thinking about the potential for a different future.
Lillian Finds the Zombies
