Lori Felker

Lori Felker is a filmmaker/artist and professor working in multiple mediums to produce experimental feminist works. Her works, often comedically, deal with the frustrating, conflicting, and overall messy realities of human interaction.

Lori’s work has had a widespread international audience with films showing in Germany, Australia, the UK and more. She wrote, directed, and edited her latest short film Discontinuity, which premiered at the Slamdance film festival in early 2016. It marks a recent shift toward narrative work after starting as a filmmaker around 2005, and follows less traditionally structured works ranging from her Broken New Series to her audio based project MOVING.

This interview was conducted in November 2017 via Skype from the interviewer’s home in Santa Cruz, California to Lori’s home in Chicago.

Juli Cooke: I am interested in what jobs you may have had in the “industry,” whether you worked as a PA or had an internship/apprenticeship, and if so what role did that play in the beginning of your career?

Lori Felker: So my undergraduate degree was in English Literature and German, and then I sort of got into film studies, because usually the film studies classes are in the Literature department at Liberal Arts schools.

This is all to say that while I was taking some film studies classes, that’s when I was like “I think I might be a filmmaker. I think I might want to make stuff.” And so I lived in Germany doing film studies for a year, and then I moved back and moved to Pittsburgh, where they have a place called Pittsburg Filmmakers. It’s like a media center and media school where other schools might send students, like Carnegie Mellon might send some of their students over there to take additional classes and stuff, because they have a lot in film and media.

So I just started taking night classes there, and then in my second class, my teacher was a professional Director of Photography in town, and even though it was only my second Super 8 class, we hit it off. I was a little older and had already graduated, from undergrad and spent a year abroad. I was taking this as a night class while working at a law office in the day. And he was like “hey do you wanna assist me on a film set? Like just show up. And it’ll be fun. Just come Saturday” type of thing, so I was like “Sure” and I went and I loved it. It was an independent film that was not well organized, and so as soon as I started to assist, my teacher/friend and I clearly made a pretty good team, and they really needed that, so by the end of the first week I was getting paid to do what I was doing. I was sort of a general assistant. I was helping to do blocking and layout, taking script notes… I was doing a lot of stuff, so it was good that the film and the set was sort of a mess, because it gave me room to come in and get some work done, and show what I could do.

So that was my first paid job, and then because I was at that, I met all these people who were in the film industry that were actually hired to be on that shoot. So then I did props assisting, P.A. work, whatever people asked me to do for them, but I still kept my legal job because it had benefits and it was full-time. The legal job was hourly, so they would let me just take the day off to work on a film set.

JC: Did you ever try to get into more of the “Hollywood” style productions?

LF: I didn’t try… I don’t know how much you know about Pittsburgh – but I moved out of Pittsburgh in 2005, and after that, after 2006 or 7, they started to get feature films again– like big ones. Some of the biggest were the Batman movies, which were filmed there, but right before that when I lived there, that was the dry spell. It was between Silence of the Lambs – which was shot in Pittsburgh – and post 2006, and there was very little in between 2001-2005.

So I did what I could, but there weren’t a lot of big options, and by the time I decided to go to grad school for filmmaking and art filmmaking, that was 2005, so I was headed in the art film direction. I was going to more galleries and experimental screenings and stuff like that by then. So at that point I didn’t have a desire to be in any of the Hollywood stuff, but it also seemed so far away because Pittsburgh wasn’t even getting big shoots – it was a lot of commercials and industrials – which is cool, and I enjoyed the daytimes I spent, but it’s not that fulfilling. Then I was really distracted with grad school, working with artists, stuff like that. I feel like actually now in my career I’m coming back around to like feature films and like “Hollywood” again.

JC: Yeah I noticed in your work you seem to be moving more toward narrative, considering your latest short, Discontinuity.

LF: Absolutely. If I consider myself a filmmaker starting about the time I went to grad school, it’s been about 12 years of filmmaking. And for about 10 of those years, people were always like “are you ever going to make a narrative?” and I was just like “I don’t really have any narrative ideas” – all my ideas have stories in them, and they’re comedic, but they weren’t really like what you would consider a marketable short or feature. I just didn’t think that way. And then all of a sudden, in 2015, when I started to write Discontinuity, all my ideas have been narrative shorts and feature ideas since then. I don’t know, something just flipped. I think it’s because I spent a good 10 years on the experimental scene. I watched a ton of work, and went to festivals, and I think you get – not that I get bored with it, like in a negative way – but you just naturally start to shift and want to do something new.

Stills from Discontinuity

JC: Well I really liked Discontinuity, especially the character interactions. It was like hilariously cringe-worthy, uncomfortable, and ridiculous, but also completely relatable and believable. I think the dialogue really guides that, so I was wondering how you went about portraying that disconnection in terms of writing the dialogue.

LF: Yeah. Well thank you, first of all, that’s a very good description. That’s what I like to think that it is, both cringe-worthy but also just really normal. So from the start, I really love those moments of the day, like sometimes – and maybe I’m just too self conscious – but I’ll stop and think about what I’ve said to someone or what they’ve said to me in that moment. And so, a lot of the dialogue is inspired by, or is directly something that I’ve said, or my partner has said, or something like that. Something where in the moment I’m just like “oh that’s amazing that we said that that way, I’m going to take that note down.” So Discontinuity is a lot of those moments crammed into 15 minutes.

As for dialogue, you know I’m not speaking like that clearly right now, I’m stumbling on my words and they’re kind of – I’m making up as I go along – I’m improvising right now. And that’s kind of written into it too. People aren’t always saying the right, or the most perfect thing, because that’s really natural. It forces us to say to each other, “wait, hold on. What did you just say?” And then you have to back up and explain yourself. So the whole thing about him, about Steven saying “how are your parents?” and then she responds, “well my mom’s okay…” because she’s thinking in her head, “my dad just died. You know that, why did you say that in that way?”

My husband only has one parent, but the language that we tend to use is like “yeah, we’re going to go to your parents’ house,” and I always find myself saying “we’re going to your parents’ for Christmas… oh wait, your dad’s.” I do that all the time, but that first time you do it, it sounds really bad, and it doesn’t seem like a slip up, it seems really insensitive. But it is just a stupid thing.

JC: Right just like the thing with Steven picking up the cat poop, like it’s not relevant to the conversation at all.

LF: Yeah and he’s thinking “oh well you just said something about your hand… I thought I’d say something about hands” and then she has to respond “I understand that, but…”

JC: But just no.

LF: Yeah exactly, and that’s something I just made up for the movie, but I do think there’s a lot of that in relationships. There’s this idea that one person will be really concerned about something, but it’s actually quite personal to them, and the other person may be close to them, but they didn’t experience what just happened to them – at work, at school, or something – so they then offer up a story of their own to show empathy, and often it really just kind of proves that they weren’t there.

JC: So you funded Discontinuity by using a Kickstarter, right? But if you suddenly had an unlimited budget, would your movies change? If so, how?

LF: Yeah. I would definitely head full force into some of the bigger narrative ideas I have, just because I think that to do a narrative well, even if you want to do it very improvised, very low-fi, using free location, not paying the actors, whatever, I still think you need the sound to be recorded well, and you need to have the camera you want, whether or not that’s expensive, so there’s a certain cost that goes into all that stuff.

Personally when I have gotten grants or other things and have been able to pay the people that work with me, that makes me really happy. So I would love to continue to pay people properly, and the more people I can pay properly, the bigger the film will be, the bigger the budget will be, and then the better it will be and the more engaged I will be. I think I would just make more solid narratives, like the feature version of Discontinuity… That was like a $10,000 budget for like 2 days of shooting, for sound mixing, color, submitting it to film festivals, feeding the crew, paying for the location, all this other stuff. There’s so much that goes into that budget. If you can imagine, that’s like a 15-minute film, multiply that by 4 or 5 to get a feature, and that’s 40 or 50,000 dollars. It’s all just money per day, per hour, for most of it. So yeah, I’d be able to make longer pieces and have more professional sound and image stuff going on.

But I think that the approach would still be the same, still weird.

Stills from Beasts in the Garden

JC: Do you think that the limitations of budget or anything else on the works you’ve done so far has created cool things that wouldn’t have come about if you had unlimited money from the beginning?

LF: Oh yeah definitely. Yeah. It touches upon everything. Like even just for getting the cats [for Discontinuity]. If that were on television they would have rented professional cats with a trainer. And maybe you’d even build the set, build the “perfect” apartment. Planning the apartment out and getting all the cats, that alone would be more than $10,000, even for just two days. I looked into hiring cats, and the quote I got was that it was around $1,000 a day for a single cat, because it paid for a person and the trained cat. And then there’s liability and all that, and I just thought, “I can’t do it, that’s my whole budget” because I wanted at least five cats. But then I ended up with nine cats because I was like “what am I going to do?” and I thought “I need a place where the cats are already there and comfortable” because you know cats don’t really like being shipped around. But I didn’t want a cat hoarder either, because that would be a messy place. I just needed a nice apartment where someone had a handful of cats. So I contacted a humane society and it turns out the person I emailed was like “yeah my wife and I both work here, we live in a house really close to you and we have nine cats and a dog, and someone shot a documentary in our living room before so you’re totally welcome to do this.” So it was perfect. I went over to visit and I loved the living room. In terms of Discontinuity it was pretty perfectly set up, even the paint worked with one wall being orange and the other one green.

So yeah it’s kinda fun, your limitations are another tool that you have to sketch with. But yeah I love that. I love being resourceful, I’m very proud when I can say “I spent one dollar on this and it totally solved this whole problem!”

JC: So knowing what you know after several years of filmmaking, what would you have done differently when you were first starting out?

LF: I was actually just thinking about this today. I think I would have just had the confidence to… well it’s weird, you need confidence and money. So even if I had had the confidence to go head first and just make, make, make, I don’t think I would have had the resources, because there’s definitely no family money to back me up, and I didn’t have a great job. It was fine but not enough that I had a budget for making stuff. So I’d like to say that I would just have had the confidence to just start making more work and to get my stuff out there, and to allow myself to claim myself as a filmmaker.

JC: Besides lacking the confidence to start, what have been some of the biggest distractions from your work? Maybe also besides the work of being a mother, and how do you overcome them?

LF: Right the baby thing is too obvious. I would say – and it’s been true for 10 years, and will always remain true – just the thought that no one cares.

Which is another reason why I never had that with Discontinuity, because I had money and a deadline and I never had that room to stop myself and ask “who wants to watch this anyway?” because someone wanted to watch it, someone needed it, I had to turn it into Fandor, because that’s what it was a part of.

So for that I was just like “I have to go, I have to get started on the shooting…” then I had to do the editing, and book the sound. For so many other things it’s just for me, right? Like ultimately I’m making a new short film to then submit to the festival circuit, to then see if it can get distributed or whatever and no one cares if I do that or not; that’s just true. That can actually trip me up, and disrupt my thoughts. If I’m writing something I can just think “eh I don’t know, maybe this isn’t good enough, nobody really cares, I’m gonna go watch eight episodes of Stranger Things instead.” So kind of finding the purpose, and finding the confidence that I have something to say is important.

JC: So then how do you know when you have something worth making or showing?

LF: If there isn’t a due date? It comes and goes. I think this is probably true for everybody but some people probably suffer from it more – but actually there’s a lot of filmmakers out there where I’m like “wow you’re really confident, and your films aren’t even that good…You just put out all this stuff and spend all this money on it…” It takes a lot of confidence to do that, especially if you’re not getting anything for it, because you know you don’t make much money off of shorts, or even independent features. You hope that these things get you more jobs and that they help you to make more work and that it propels you forward but so many people still have day jobs or independent funding sources or familial funding sources – or something. So really at the core of it, you just need to want to do it and believe that you have something to say. For me personally, I’m probably a little self-deprecating so every time I will talk myself out of stuff. I think what helps is to include people in on the process as much as possible, to get another voice and some feedback. Whether that is getting a script I wrote into the mouths of actors or sharing it with a friend so that they can read it and say “this is awesome/this is funny/this is good/this is important/this sounds right to me,” which gives me enough energy to be like “okay! I’ll keep going then!” But if I keep it too tightly reined in, if it’s too private, I’ll just convince myself not to make it.

JC: I’ve seen you’ve done a few collaborations, is that the motive behind the collaborations? And you’re looking to do more collaborations?

LF: Yeah I love collaborating. Because that’s like a contract with another person. Just like I had a contract with Fandor for Discontinuity. I feel like I only have to believe about 50% to work with another person. I’m just so excited to help another person with their ideas. It’s funny I’m so harsh on myself, I’m like “nobody cares about your ideas,” but if someone else has a crazy idea and wants me to help I’m like “yeah!” So yeah, collaboration really keeps me going. I think if I’m working on my own stuff, as long as someone else is involved I consider that a collaboration. Even if it’s just that I have a hired sound recordist, as soon as there’s a person there I want some feedback from them and I want them to bring their expertise, and then it becomes some sort of collaboration and then we have a vague contract where we’re committed to working on this thing together.

I feel like I’m babbling.

JC: Oh no no, I’m just kinda stunned because I do a lot of that too and think that way. So when you’re working on film how do you keep yourself on track? Do you keep a schedule?

LF: Like on a shoot or in life?

JC: Well if you have a life plan for films I’m curious about that too, but yes on a shoot.

LF: So it’s different for every movie, because there are different people that I am beholden to for every movie. Like for Discontinuity, I got some money to make it, and that process had a deadline on it. So I was like “okay, I got the award, it makes the most sense to shoot when school’s done in June so that I can have my edit done by August” which is when they wanted it. So I just followed the guidelines they gave me, and actually that was probably like the most perfectly packaged – less than a year – making of a film ever. I had a very clear path laid out for me, it was only like 2 days of shooting. I planned it really tightly.

Behind the scenes of Discontinuity and MOVING

JC: Oh wow that’s impressive.

LF: Yeah well technically it’s all in one room. The cats in it all live in that house, and so everything was just there. We just had to move a few things to decorate, but I made it very easy to work with.

But then in other films, like the feature length documentary I’m working on, it’s been 6 years and every month I’m like “I’m going to finish it at the end of this month” but now it’s November 1^st which means I did not finish it in October. And waking up this morning the first thing I thought of was “ugh, another personal goal set and passed.” So I just keep setting my own deadlines and trying but now having a newborn, well she’s 7 months now, but having a baby – I have time to work but it’s not when I think I’ll have it.

JC: You can’t predict it at all.

Lori's upcoming film

LF: Right exactly, so now, what’s happened to me over the past 7 months is different for me than any other sort of past planning mode because I can’t say “oh I’ll work when I get home tonight,” because I don’t know if she’ll be waking up early or if I’ll be exhausted from not sleeping the night before. Now I don’t even know how to explain my planning…

JC: Yeah you’ll have to see when her schedule normalizes.

LF: It’ll normalize at some point.

JC: So you’re a teacher too. I read an interview with you from a while ago that said “My dream job is a film director or film professor at NYU…”

LF: What’s that from?

JC: I can’t quite remember, it said you were living in Berlin at the time…

LF: Woah. Oh I think I know what interview you’re talking about, woah yeah, I haven’t read that in a long time. That was probably put out by my undergrad, and I wasn’t even a filmmaker yet. Like I owned a video camera and I made weird little things, and at the time I had applied to go to NYU for the following year, but that was the beginning of me being like, “Will anyone let me be a filmmaker?” “Is this okay?” “Can I..?” “Am I allowed to go in this direction?” Yeah that’s funny, I thought, “when did I say that?” and then I’m like that was like 17 years ago or something.

JC: So have you always wanted to teach? And how does that balance with making films for you now?

LF: Yeah. So I’ve probably wanted to be a teacher since like… middle school or something like that? My dad was an elementary school teacher – he’s retired now – and I just always loved going to school with him when he would prepare for the semester, to hang stuff up… the idea of having kids around me.

So every year that went by for me in school I thought “I’m going to be a teacher” but I would always just change the subject or the grade. At some point I wanted to teach high school English because I had a great high school English teacher, and then by the time I got to college I was like “well, I want to teach college.” Then “I want to teach film studies now,” and so for a really long time it was like “what kind of teacher am I going to be?”

But then once I really got into filmmaking I saw directing as this other kind of teaching, this other kind of leading of a group and having a point and organizing a group of people towards a certain goal. And when I got into experimental film, that’s kind of how that whole world works. You can’t make a lot of money off experimental film, and a lot of people teach to support their work, and in that community, you’re very much a maker and a teacher. And so that just worked perfectly for me, It thought “oh well that’s perfect, I’ll teach and I’ll make – at the same time.”

JC: And so now as a university professor, how does that work with making films at the same time?

LF: I’ve been a full time professor for 4.5 years roughly which means I get my summers off, and it means I don’t have to beg for classes every semester, I actually have a contract, I can rely on it, there’s benefits… Now that I’m 4 years into that, it’s great because I can plan to work in the summer, I can plan since I don’t teach solidly 5 days a week – I’m certainly busy with class prep and everything that comes with being a professor, but the schedule’s malleable so it’s easy to squeeze some shooting in during the week, where if I had a 9-5 job I wouldn’t be able to do that. So yeah it allows me to afford to spend some money on my work, and more importantly spend time on my work. And my students inspire me a lot. And with talking about film all the time in class, I just get a lot of ideas.

JC: I feel like it’s really difficult to think of ideas for films, especially narrative ideas, which are what I’m interested in as a student. Do your students struggle with that? And how do you help them past it?

LF: When you’re a student you’re under pressure to make stuff all the time. My students only take film classes so they’re making three or more videos a semester depending on which classes they’re in, and they have a bunch of finals and they’re just making stuff all the time. And it makes them kind of burnt out on ideas because they have all these subjects and scripts they have go through and make all these different things constantly. So when they ask, “how do we keep doing this” I just remind them that they’re in an unrealistic situation, with really short deadlines that come really often.

For me, I’m not really beholden to anyone most of the time, and when I am, a lot of the time I’ve already thought of something and committed to it, and then I submit it for a grant or something like that. Because basically, you can’t force an idea. To say “okay I’m going to make a film that is going to be a narrative. Now I just have to start writing and it will come out because I have to do it,” I think that’s how I used to try to write things. But then I felt terrible at it and just thought “oh whatever.”

For example Discontinuity came to me like an idea, and then because I didn’t have to make it I just thought about it for a long time, I was able to talk to some friends about it, we laughed about it, I got to work through the ideas, and then when I had this chance to apply for the money I wrote up the script and sent it in, and then it all just went forward from there. I didn’t have to force it though. So I think any time that something has to be forced it’s 100 times harder to do, whereas if it really comes to you like an inspiration, and it’s forming itself, you can write a script in a day or a weekend. Obviously you’d have to do some work on it later, but the initial thing just flows right out. But you can’t ask for inspiration, or put a quarter in a machine and get inspiration for your homework.

So I tell my students to allow what they’re doing now to be practice. Open up your ability to work in a script form, and then when the inspiration hits you’re all the better at working through that process and when that perfect film idea is ready you’re ready to do it with more confidence. I think simplifying things is another good way to do it. If it’s simple than you can really focus on it and you can do something simple really well, rather than if you’re trying to make a Quentin Tarantino feature as an 8-minute short, and you want to have guns etc. If you do that it’s just going to be goofy student work, you have to break away from that. But if you do some sort of character study or have a singular point, you can do that. You can really focus on it and spend a lot of your time perfecting something simple.

That was another thing for me with Discontinuity: I knew that I had to have it done in a year, and I didn’t know if I would be any good at making a narrative, so the idea of two people in one room just having a conversation was that simplicity. Kind of just “I’m going to try to focus on doing this one thing, just a 15 minute slice of time in one room” but then the cats were the complication with that. Simplifying things makes it cheaper, easier to get done, easier to write, but it also shows you what you actually need in a narrative, what really needs to be there. Often the most important thing is an emotion, an idea, or the turning point, but not everything else around it.

JC: So along with being a University professor, you mentioned being like a teacher on set. What’s your approach to being in charge as the creative leader of films you work on?

LF: It’s funny, I’m like a non-perfectionist control freak. I want to do everything: like what the camera does is really important to me, so I want to choose the lenses. I want to look through it, and design the shots. I also want to talk to the actors, or sometimes I want to perform in it myself. I want to write, I want to make all the decisions, all that stuff. And if I could I would really do everything, but it’s better when you share the work. I’ve learned I’m supposed to let go a little bit, then I can bring professionals in to help me and make my work even better. So I want to be in control of it all but at the same time I’m not a picky perfectionist – I tend to be totally comfortable improvising on the spot or being resourceful. Even cutting corners when need be if I’m hitting a point in the day where we need to “cut this, change this, because the weather’s not right.” I kind of love that moment and making something new out of it. Even if it’s something that would be disappointing to someone else and they would reschedule it or redo it, I’m fine just flying by the seat of my pants and being like “that’s fine! We don’t need this!”

JC: Right, then you can get new things out of shots that you didn’t anticipate.

LF: Yeah, with Discontinuity, I wrote a script and I drew out – very badly because I’m not great at drawing – a storyboard, because I had particular shots in mind, but then I chose two actors that were capable of improvising, so they would read my lines, and improvise. So sometimes I would have both to work within the edit or my lines would morph into what they added to it. And so that shows both: that I wanted to write it, create it, visualize it, but then throw the paper at them and be like “what do you guys want to do with this?”

JC: And that helps with new ideas and directions too. So do you have a no fail go to when you need inspiration or if you’re in a creative rut?

LF: Watching movies. Being at film festivals gives me a lot of ideas because if you go to a film festival and you’re watching a lot of stuff – which I do, usually my days are full with screenings – you’re going to see a lot of stuff you don’t like, and usually the stuff I don’t like, or I find unsuccessful, gives me all the ideas. I’ll be like “oh this person doesn’t realize that the good idea in this movie is this and not that.” So in that way, I’ll take that, what they didn’t even see, and I’ll steal it for something or it’ll spark ideas in my mind. Really good movies don’t usually make me want to make more movies, they make me want to give up. Like I really liked the new Twin Peaks by David Lynch that came out this summer, but it just made me go “Why make anything when this exists?” But yeah, going to film festivals and just seeing a lot… and also I think sometimes seeing the holes, you can be like, “oh man I’m not represented in here” or “I have something to say about this thing” and then “I want to be the person to do that.” So that helps.

JC: Right, so I noticed a sort of speaking up or out kind of a trend in some of your work. In your Working with Nature you used the format of the gardening help show to portray ideas about human interaction, introspection, and personality performance. I saw this as a sort of subversion of the characters we see in media, even in reality shows where they are “real” people. Adrienne Edmunds seems to be progressively more direct as she moves from the way these figures would address the audience to more serious topics. And then we see the same sort of idea played out a little sillier in It Doesn’t Matter. What’s your intention with that sort of approach and structure?

LF: Working with Nature was the first one I made, and that was just an idea I had one day where I thought it would just be so funny to see someone performing gardening tasks– there was a gardening show I really liked and watched on TV even though I don’t garden – and if they were just sort of angry and yelling about something. Then that morphed into what she is. If you turned the sound down on that video it would just look like a totally normal, maybe public access gardening show. That became interesting to me, that idea of using the sound and what she is saying as a window to what she really cares about and what she’s really feeling at the time even though it appears a different way. And then after that each other piece just stemmed from that idea that I liked of a TV show being this type of protective bubble where the people who host just feel like “this is my job, I’ll just present these things, no big deal, I travel, I go do this, I’m a scientist, I’m doing the news, this is just what I do” But then with where I’m going there’s this rip in the time-space continuum and the real questions and feelings come out. Those just came one right after the other and allowed truth to come out through the polished exterior we always see. I love it when you can see the real come through these hosts. It was common after 9/11 to see newscasters crying, for example Dan Rather and Brian Williams, where these newscasters’ real opinions or feelings leak out. I think it’s about the surprise of it. I think I just kept imagining in that form.

JC: So you mentioned sound a few times and how you think hiring a sound person can be really important, and I noticed sound and music playing a big role in Discontinuity. Obviously Moving is concentrating on movement but sound plays a huge role in portraying that movement, and in Across and Down as seemingly unrelated images flashed by the sound carried me through and made it cohesive. Especially with having experience in sound yourself, how do you let someone else have the reins, and how do you go about communicating your intentions and goals for the sound?

LF: In Across and Down, I was in Uganda with another filmmaker and we both were doing field recordings. She got some great field recordings andshe let me use hers for this experimental film, and that was fun because her field recording could come first, and then I would think about what images should go with it. Sometimes sounds for me can be so rich that it’s not always images coming first that I put sound to, it can really happen in the other direction for me. I think that probably comes from my background in the music scene, being in a band, but then I guess more recently the sound help has been there to help me record and mix. It does turn into a collaboration because when I’ve written the dialogue, and the actors have spoken it, and there’s someone else there to mix it to bring something to the foreground or background, I see how much it effects editing and the film itself.

JC: So last question, how do you define the terms experimental and feminist in reference to your works and what do they mean to you?

LF: Well experimental–I use it all the time because it’s shorthand to say a lot of things, but essentially I find it kind of a ridiculous term. When I really use it intentionally, it’s when I think I’m actually experimenting with an idea. So I always say that the most experimental piece I made is the news piece (the Broken New Series), I did it almost in my sleep, where I absorbed news headlines before I went to bed, then I just dreamed stuff and then reported the news on camera in the middle of the night from my dreams. I had no idea how it would turn out, I didn’t even know if I was going to delete it all, and I have a lot more of it but I really had to edit it down and figure out what to do with it. I really didn’t know what I was doing, like “what will happen if I…?” So that felt a lot more like an actual experiment throughout the whole process, and it was so much about the process, and then I saw what my results were. There’s a little bit of experimentation in everything I do because I leave room to improvise, but that one in particular was very much an experimental process.

Feminism for me– I think because of the voice that I have and that I want to have, any move that I make is part of my feminist efforts because for example I want to be funny, but comedy is definitely dominated by men still to this day. I want to shout when I want to shout, or be irritated or angry when I want to be irritated or angry, and those are things that make women either “shrill” or “bitchy,” so just making sure I’m speaking up when I want to speak up. Then even just being the one woman present in the room with all the male filmmakers, which still happens. Once I was on a panel with all white men named like Robert, and so there’s still so many ways in which just being present is important, and so anything I do is feminist. I’m always asserting, “I am here, and I’m a girl.”

You can find full length versions of projects, press, and awards on Lori Felker's website http://www.felkercommalori.com and on her Vimeo page https://vimeo.com/lorifelker Keep up to date with her on Twitter @FelkerCommaLori