Our latest series, New American Voices, happening over the next six weeks, will spotlight young independent directors whose approach to filmmaking reflects new trends in American cinema, channeling their influences into new territories. From observational portraits of family life, visions of disquiet in the city, and misadventures in the suburbs, this sample of films offers a glimpse into what’s on American filmmakers’ minds at this moment.

Kicking off the series is Texan-born filmmaker Lucy Kerr’s enigmatic feature debut Family Portrait, which earned her a Best Director Award at Locarno 2023. Centered around Katy (a magnetic Deragh Campbell), the film depicts her struggle to gather her relatives together for a Christmas card photo while on vacation.

According to Kerr, “The South is overrepresented, but always in the same way.” Her aim with Family Portrait was to make something different that observed the isolated rituals of a well-to-do Texan oil family that sustains itself on idle conversation. Inspired by Gothic writers like William Faulkner and Edgar Allen Poe (who is cited at the start of the film), Kerr emphasizes how distant this clan feels from the rest of the world, staging a claustrophobic narrative within a large family estate whose acres of land feel stifling rather than liberating.

A deft choreographer, Kerr captures Katy’s anxious strolls around the estate in a series of roving long takes. Her seamless transitions between inane conversations among sisters and scenes of kids playing on the lawn create a nuanced portrait of life in the suburbs, where life, it seems, is indifferent to commotion, whether it’s a woman’s disappearance or another’s nervous breakdown.

“The entire property where Family Portrait was (my grandparents’ old home) was swept away in the devastating July 4th flood that happened this past year in Hunt, Texas on the Guadalupe river. Fortunately, my extended family who was there all got out just in time. Watching the film/seeing the images now has such an uncanny feeling to me.” LUCY KERR

With the sudden and tragic floods that overtook the setting of Family Portrait, the film has accumulated an additional level of eeriness on top of the one Kerr taps into in the film’s second half (a bifurcation inspired by Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady). To see the region now is to rekindle a memory: an unexpected, and uncannily apt, dimension for a film about how memories are staged to take on.

NY-based director and choreographer Lucy Kerr makes films that deal with rituals, movement, and performance. She studied Philosophy and Dance at UT-Austin before attending CalArts to focus on filmmaking. Her shorts Crashing Waves (2021) and Site of Passage (2022) both observe rehearsed and organic meaning-making, in Hollywood and girlhood games respectively. Family Portrait expands on these instincts, capturing the complex dynamics of a large family in the South. Her next film promises to probe the debutante ball “as a very occult kind of ritual.”

Special thanks to Lucy Kerr and Katarina Docalovich.