Ida Western Exile

A film comprised of 1960s home movies shot on Muscle Beach, Los Angeles.

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.

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.

An exploration of the "five labia types," as claimed by an aesthetician.

Commission for Cinema-19 (Anthology Film Archives, Zeitgeist Theatre, Northwest Film Forum)

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.

A collection of 190-second short films created in response to COVID-19, commissioned by filmmakers Usama Alshaibi and Adam Sekuler.

A documentary about the concrete sections of the Berlin Wall that have been acquired by institutions or individuals since 1989 and are now scattered across the USA. Cherished or abandoned, they have become silent witnesses to recent history.