MADAME

Genre: NOIR / experimental

Part Grimm’s fairy tale, part tone-poem, & part Borgesian riddle, "MADAME" tells the story of a young girl's miseducation at the hands of her dubious, criminally-minded foster mother.

Length: 8 minutes, 22 seconds

Please scroll down for project history, director/writer artistic statement & bio, cast & team bios, and technical specs.

Thank you for considering “Madame” for your event, venue, or festival!

Love,

The Madame-Fam

need a press kit?

Email muirkerry@aol.com

“WITNESSING AN ACTOR THROW THEMSELVES INTO A ROLE WITH AN ALL-OR-NOTHING ATTITUDE IS ALWAYS —ALWAYS—A GORGEOUS THING.”

— Bill Arceneaux, “MovieGoing with Bill”

“Like a Warhol film wrapped up in a Bette Davis confection!”

— Kate Moira Ryan, playwright; OTMA, The Motherf**king O’Malleys

“Absolutely swept off my feet with these visuals. This is a prime example of limitations producting the greatest art. I’m a firm believer in this notion.”

—Aahil Somani, Letterboxd

PROJECT HISTORY: "MADAME"

The idea for the film came to me in the Spring of 2018. I was listening to Freya Cellista's sound collage "St. James Park" (from her album “Finding San Jose”) and suddenly saw—very clearly, in my mind’s eye—a young girl, small suitcase in hand, waiting for a train. She was alone in the world, en route to an interim foster home where a shady ogre of a woman awaited her arrival. I began to write these two figures down, the girl and the crone… and word by word, scene by scene, the script for "Madame" emerged.

At the time I was enrolled in a beginning film making course at City College of San Francisco and had access to the department's vast stores of equipment, so I plunged in and filmed the script with my aunt and young niece over Spring break. It was a family affair, chaotic and frenzied, shot in my mother’s house, with my sister helping me MacGyver small, impromptu soundstages out of blankets and curtains. We shot late into the wee hours of the night, and then got up early in the mornings to shoot scenes on the train, harvesting over a terabyte of footage in a very short but intense span of time.

During the pandemic and the subsequent advent of Zoom in all our lives, I happened to cross paths in cyberspace with Vermont-based filmmaker and editor Sean Temple (Water Horse, The Thaw, Thorns). I'd been struggling for over a year with an overly-long edit of my own making, and it was clear to me I didn't have the editing chops to bring my vision to fruition. After connecting with Sean (we both shared a love of Maya Deren's "Meshes of the Afternoon," as well as the work of both Nina Menkes and David Lynch), I handed Sean the editing reins, and he became my co-producer, distilling the story down to its essence, paring the edit back radically in length, and pushing the piece further into the dreamlike, subconscious realm from whence it first sprang.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read, and for your consideration.

xo,
Kerry

Director Statement

Not all of my writing pertains to children and teens trying to navigate a baffling and pernicious world—but the truth is: Most of it does. I’m fascinated by the ways children and teens deploy fantasy, imagined experience and outright delusion to cope in the face of extreme adversity.

I’m haunted by the subject of entrapment—both mental and physical—and the ways in which people fight to escape it via the imagination. Obsessions that crop up repeatedly in my work: Characters living on the margins, in severe isolation. Outcasts. Folks who simply don’t belong. Characters who are near-holy in their derangement: wildly damaged, appallingly alone, and violently ill-equipped to love…but who try, anyway. My imagination is frequented by a steady stream of characters personifying Cioran’s "failure on the move” — while they may be headed for the inevitable crash-landing, they still insist on letting their imaginations unfurl like splashy, multi-colored parachutes, to break the pain of the fall.

Movies that affected me profoundly include: The Florida Project; Precious; Pan’s Labyrinth; Jesus’ Son; Laurie Collyer’s Sherrybaby; Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild; Casavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence; Visconti’s Bellissima; Fellini’s La Strada, and his Nights of Cabiria.

Literary works that honed the lens through which I see the world: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Frank Baum’s Oz books; C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia; Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita; and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son

Writer/Director Biography

Kerry Muir is a writer and director living in the Bay Area. As an actress, she was nominated for best actress by LA Weekly for her performance as Hester in Athol Fugard's "Hello and Goodbye" across from Jeff Alan-Lee. As a writer, her plays have received awards and productions from Nantucket Short Play Festival, The Kilroys, Gibraltar International Drama Festival, Maxim Mazumdar New Play Competition, The Great Platte River Playwrights' Festival, and elsewhere. Her play "The Night Buster Keaton Dreamed Me" as well as her one-act play for children, "Befriending Bertha," were both published by NoPassport Press in dual-language (English/Spanish) editions as part of NoPassport's "Dreaming the Americas" series, curated by Obie Award-winning playwright, Caridad Svich. A prolific writer of nonfiction, her prose has appeared in Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, Fourth Genre, West Branch, and elsewhere.

Sean Temple (Co-Producer/Editor)

Sean Temple is a Director, Editor, Screenwriter, and Video Artist based in Vermont. He believes cinema’s unique ability to tell character-driven stories through image and sound enhances our capacity for empathy. Sean is a working artist who finished his MFA in Media Arts at Emerson College. His professional editing work includes the creation and production of theatrical trailers, television campaigns, and social media spots for Netflix, Sony, IFC Films, and more. His award-winning short films, co-directed with Sarah Wisner, use subtlety and nuance to invite their audiences to derive their own layers of meaning from their thoughtfully composed visuals. Their short films have been featured in numerous festivals and contests, including Fantastic Fest, Beyond Fest, Independent Film Festival Boston, Sidewalk Film Festival, and many more.

Ann Mayo Muir (“Madame”)

has had a long, illustrious career as a recording artist and nationally touring musician, most often performing with the legendary folk trio, Bok, Muir & Trickett. In those years she distinguished herself as a singer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, recording two solo albums and nine critically acclaimed albums with the trio. Her most recent CD, “Notes From Across the Sea,” features instrumental music that Ann composed, performed and recorded by the Grammy-nominated Celtic classical-crossover group, Ensemble Galilei.

Maggie Rose Mersmann (“The Girl”)

is currently a junior in high school, and enjoys playing soccer, crafting, and hip-hop dance.

Dan Olmsted (Audio Mix)

Daniel Olmsted studied film production at San Francisco State University.  He was then hired onto the staff of the Saul Zaentz Film Center in Berkeley, a facility for post production sound work on feature films. He spent the next 15 years working as a recordist, sound designer and sound mixer on a variety of feature films, documentaries and short films including well-know films like Boogie Nights, The English Patient, Twin Peaks and many more. Along with teaching in the CCSF Cinema Department, Dan continues to work as a sound designer and mixer, and plays guitar in the alt/country band Loretta Lynch, and the imrov/jazz band, Mushroom.

Cellista (music)

Los Angeles-based Cellista is a performance artist with creative roots in the Bay Area and Colorado. She creates stage poems (narrative multimedia works) after those of the artist Jean Cocteau, which juxtapose seemingly disparate elements. Her stage poems are acts of resistance art; investigating the ruptures of daily life. They are politically concerned, observant, and revealing; breaking down the borders between audiences and performers, disciplines, and genres. Fresh off her 2021 Lincoln Center debut, Cellista is a sought after collaborator. She has worked with Grammy-nominated artist Tanya Donelly, producer John Vanderslice, Troyboi, Don McLean, Casey Crescenzo (The Dear Hunter), Van Dyke Parks, Tony! Toni! Toné! and Pam the Funkstress. Her compositions and performances have been heard on film and TV including PBS; She has appeared as an extra on the TV shows Better Things and Will & Grace playing her cello. Most recently, she composed music for the true-crime reality show The Real Murders of Orange County. Her interdisciplinary exhibit The End of Time premiered alongside renowned visual artist Barron Storey’s solo exhibit Quartet at Anno Domini art gallery in downtown San Jose with her chamber music collective the Juxtapositions Chamber Ensemble. Her stage poem Pariah, was released in Fall of 2021. The operatic fairy tale received critical acclaim. It features a companion book by the philosopher Frank Seeburger. It explores themes of othering and exile within our communities. She is a former chapter governor of the Recording Academy(GRAMMYs) and a former San Jose arts commissioner. She received a masters in business from the Berklee College of Music in 2020. She is the founding artistic director of House of Cellista in Longmont, CO; a micro-center for the arts which advocates and offers subsidized housing to working artists. She is currently at work on Elegie, a stage poem for static trapeze, silent film, and cello. Cellista plays a Luis & Clarke carbon fibre cello and an 1885 Czech cello named Chordelia.

“Madame” Technical specs:

Picture: Black and White and Color

Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 (4:3)

Shot on: Digital

Sound Format: Stereo

Length: 8 minutes, 22 seconds

Available on DCP

Thank you for your time & consideration!

Love,

The Madame-fam