Katelin Describes a Crisis, 9:44, video (2026)
A family invents a series of rituals to describe the trouble they’re in: first a burial, then an alien invasion. A cappella songs composed for the film act as a twisted guide, describing different ways the world has already ended. This is a musical portrait of a family trying to survive.
The film is currently on its festival run. Please reach out if you would like a screener!
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Black Hole Space Debt, or A Basic Guide to Syncing Sound and Image, 13:48, 16mm (2022)
An instructional document about making a handmade optical soundtrack becomes a speculative sci-fi narrative about going to Mars. As the film progresses, the nature of the soundtrack comes to speak for the way space exploration is one part of a larger, systemic repetition of colonialism and debt peonage.
Watch here:
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Lillian Finds the Zombies, 14:30, video (2021)
The film begins as a portrait of Lillian, the filmmaker’s younger sister, set on the edge of adulthood. As the rest of their family becomes involved in the film’s production, it quickly becomes a post-apocalyptic game of historiography, exploring the city of Negaunee’s history of natural resource exploitation through the dream-like haze of childhood creativity.
Watch here:
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Psychic Meat, 9:55, 16mm & video (2020)
“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
Please reach out if interested in watching the film in full. Here is an excerpt:
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Suburban Versions, 7:34, video (2020)
A cheesy sexual encounter unfolds within the space of a suburban house. The house gets aroused, becoming an archive of musical sync points borrowed from kitschy gay pornography–this is a prefabricated fantasy. Originally made as an exercise in an Image Design class, its original intent was to make something that Mike Gibisser would laugh at. It became a curious artifact that predicts the era of social distancing with odd prescience.
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Uriah Plays the Alien, 9:04, video (2018)
An alien crash-lands on Earth, and a group of siblings attempt to nurse him back to health. This film is a series of speculative improvisations stitched together to make a documentary portrait of a family.
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The Katelin Show, 5:12, 16mm (2018)
Katelin joyfully creates an internet variety show about herself by singing along to karaoke videos on YouTube. Meanwhile, the camera captures glimpses of the family’s Christmas party.
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Stephen Wardell 