Madame

Not all of my writing pertains to children and teens trying to navigate a baffling and pernicious world—but the truth is: Most of it does. I’m fascinated by the ways children and teens deploy fantasy, imagined experience and outright delusion to cope in the face of extreme adversity.

I’m haunted by the subject of entrapment—both mental and physical—and the ways in which people fight to escape it via the imagination. Obsessions that crop up repeatedly in my work: Characters living on the margins, in severe isolation. Outcasts. Folks who simply don’t belong. Characters who are near-holy in their derangement... wildly damaged, appallingly alone, and violently ill-equipped to love, but who try, anyway. My imagination is frequented by characters personifying Cioran’s "failure on the move”: while they may be headed for the inevitable crash-landing, they still insist on letting their imaginations unfurl-- like splashy, multi-colored parachutes-- to break the pain of the fall.

Movies that affected me profoundly include: The Florida Project; Precious; Pan’s Labyrinth; Jesus’ Son; Laurie Collyer’s Sherrybaby; Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild; Casavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence; Visconti’s Bellissima; Fellini’s La Strada, and his Nights of Cabiria.

Literary works that honed and polished the lens through which I see: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Frank Baum’s Oz books; C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia; Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita; and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son.

PROJECT HISTORY: "MADAME"

The idea for the film came to me in the Spring of 2018. I was listening to Freya Cellista's sound collage "St. James Park" (from her album, Finding San Jose) and suddenly saw—very clearly, in my mind’s eye—a young girl, small suitcase in hand, waiting for a train. She was alone in the world, en route to an interim foster home where a shady ogre of a woman awaited her arrival. I began to write these two figures down, the girl and the crone… and word by word, scene by scene, the script for "Madame" emerged.

At the time I was enrolled in a beginning film making course at City College of San Francisco and had access to the department's vast stores of equipment, so I plunged in and filmed the script with my aunt and young niece over Spring break. It was a family affair, chaotic and frenzied, shot in my mother’s house, with my sister helping me MacGyver small, impromptu soundstages out of blankets and curtains. We shot late into the wee hours of the night, and then got up early in the mornings to shoot scenes on the train, harvesting over a terabyte of footage in a very short but intense span of time.

During the pandemic and the subsequent advent of Zoom in all our lives, I happened to cross paths in cyberspace with Vermont-based filmmaker and editor Sean Temple (Water Horse, The Thaw, Thorns). I'd been struggling for over a year with an overly-long edit of my own making, and it was clear to me I didn't have the editing chops to bring my vision to fruition. After connecting with Sean (we both shared a love of Maya Deren's "Meshes of the Afternoon," as well as the work of both Nina Menkes and David Lynch), I handed Sean the editing reins, and he became my co-producer, distilling the story down to its essence, paring the edit back radically in length, and pushing the piece further into the dreamlike, subconscious realm from which the original idea for "Madame" first sprung.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read, and for your consideration.

xo,
Kerry