Movies: James N. Kienitz Wilkins

In the aftermath of a conspiracy-minded father’s sudden death, his daughter inherits his patent for an experimental healing device. Featuring archives from Callie Hernandez's late father, Invention explores the process of grieving a complicated paren...

A young man disappears amid talk of violence and demagoguery, leaving behind an obscure cache of letters, postcards, and notebooks....

An ode to movie culture and its beguiling hold on our imagination, modeled on an actual legal deposition, and accompanied by a procession of 35mm publicity stills from studio press kits....

Composer and filmmaker Christian von Borries' new film Desert of the real visits these contemporary wastelands. In a rich collage of acted scenes and documentary footage, he extends the metaphor of the wasteland to today's medial reality. At the hear...

The movie arose out of our sparetime as teenagers with fresh driver’s licenses and cobbled-together camera gear, wandering around a tired and honestly pretty grim post-industrial mill community, reinforced with after-hours access to the darkroom at t...

A young couple is shaken by a seemingly fraudulent yet unprovable act that strikes to the core of their cultural pretensions....

A semi-biographical fiction inspired by his father’s work at one of Kodak’s first processing labs, Wilson’s speculative gloss on the evolution of photochemical science entwines multiple perspectives and personas. Co-written by James N. Kienitz Wilkin...

A procession of black-and-silvery-white stills of New England’s Androscoggin River unspools alongside an anxious monologue on movies, memory, and minor history....

A girl recollects a boy named Moon....

Mallard Gibson and Singuz Gumpfree have disowned the society of men: they have instead long conversations with a hare named Jackrabbit, with whom they share a shack on the banks of the East River. Amongst mystic visions, dark humour and anarchic asso...

A ghostly militia of lookalikes gradually lose their menace....

Public Hearing is the verbatim re-performance of a rural American town meeting from a transcript downloaded as publicly available information. Shot entirely in cinematic close-up on black-and-white 16mm film, a cast of actors and non-actors read betw...

An anonymous and mediated testimonial about one man's dangerous dream....

An epic story about a group of American libertarians told in a unique manner, as both an audio performance and an experimental film. The piece features an ensemble cast of 15 actors, each individually recorded and then edited together sentence-by-sen...

A private eye type guy recounts a tricky case, set against the unedited duration of a found BetaSP tape....

In this kaleidoscopic portrait, a screenwriter, an actor, an urban shaman, and the director himself contend with the everyday annoyances that fill the life of an artist....

In the children’s book Best Busy Year Ever by Richard Scarry, the hustle and bustle of a city is captured through colorful illustrations. Using his performative storytelling narration, Wilkins questions contemporary social issues with understated iro...

Special Features is an apparent interview with three highlights. Presented as a lo-fi fragment from a forgotten video production, an interviewee interacts with an interviewer, recounting a special experience at once unique and shared....

This Action Lies is a movie about the limits of observation, about staring very hard at something while listening to something else. It is a paranoid polyphonic apology of a simple act: offering three perspectives of an object that may not exist in a...

Mediums is a medium-length film, shot all in medium shots....