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Courtney Stephens

Directing

Biography

Courtney Stephens (US) is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Her non-fiction and experimental films address the contours of language, historical memory and women's lives. Her work has been exhibited at the Berlinale, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, the National Gallery of Art, South by Southwest, The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hong Kong, Camden, Mumbai, Luxembourg, Dhaka and San Francisco International Film Festivals. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, a California Humanities Grant, fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Pocantico and the Sloan Foundation and was one of Filmmaker Magazine's twenty-five "New Faces of Independent Film." A graduate of the American Film Institute, she co-founded the Los Angeles microcinema Veggie Cloud and has curated film programs for The Getty Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image, UnionDocs and Flaherty NYC.

Filmography Movies

Acting

MOVIE

Scumrock

6.4(0.0K)

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

Topology of Sirens

6.0(0.0K)

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

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Topology of Sirens

Cas

Production

MOVIE

Terra Femme

Not rated yet

Amateur travelogues by women in the 1920s-50s are woven into this meditation on the traveler’s gaze. A mountaineer, a divorcee on a tour of biblical gardens, an antique merchant and others are revealed through their own optical autobiographies.

Iris Season

Not rated yet

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

Terra Femme

Lesser Choices

6.0(0.0K)

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.

John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office

6.7(0.0K)

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.

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John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office

Director