Courtney Stephens’ Invention is a film about memory disguised as fiction, or perhaps fiction disguised as memory. Co-written with actor Callie Hernández, the film unfolds as a quiet reckoning with grief, identity, and the ways we metabolize personal loss into narrative. Drawing from the real biographies of the filmmakers’ late fathers, Invention becomes less about plot and more about atmosphere—of mourning, displacement, and the spiritual residue left behind by absence. What begins in the register of intimacy—shared conversations, inherited mannerisms—gradually expands into something broader, a meditation on what we preserve and what we imagine in the wake of loss.
Stephens has long worked in the blurred terrain between fiction and nonfiction, but Invention marks a refinement of that approach. Where her previous films often relied solely on archival material, this one uses the texture of the present as well—faces, gestures, lingering silences—to suggest that invention is itself a form of truth-telling.
Text by Dalia Morgan
4. APRIL. MMXXV. PLUM
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