Invention

In Invention, Callie Hernandez and Courtney Stephens tease out the complexity of grief and the banal and often bizarre practicalities that accompany it. Born from a fortuitous meeting at a dinner party, their collaboration draws from their own experiences of losing their fathers, sketching out a shared fictional world in which they ask what it means to play the part of the grieving daughter. As the protagonist played by Hernandez encounters friends and associates of her father, more questions are found than answers and she becomes entangled in a web of grief and conspiracy.

~ Myriam Mouflih

Courtney Stephens is a writer/director of four feature films and numerous shorts. Terra Femme, composed of amateur travel footage shot by women in the early 20th century, was a New York Times critic’s pick and has toured widely as a live performance. The American Sector (with Pacho Velez) follows slabs of the Berlin Wall installed around the US. John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (with Michael Almereyda) explores the world of psychedelics pioneer John C. Lilly, and Invention, a semi-fiction feature about an obscure healing device, premiered at Locarno in 2024. Her films have been exhibited at MoMA, The National Gallery of Art, The Barbican, Istanbul Modern, Walker Art Center, Thailand Biennale, and film festivals including the Berlinale, Viennale, Rotterdam, Thessaloniki, IDFA, SXSW, Hong Kong, and the New York Film Festival. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, and grants from California Humanities, the Sloan Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Art.

In addition to co-curating the miniature cinema Veggie Cloud since 2014, she has organized film screenings for The Getty, Flaherty NYC, Human Resources, and Museum of the Moving Image. Her writing has appeared in BOMB, Film Comment, Cabinet, Filmmaker, and The New Inquiry.