Name: Kathleen Bryson and Kimmo Möykky
Born — Location: USA — United Kingdom - Finland — United Kingdom
Our two films are complementary. The first, Baked Alaska (feature, 2019, UK), is an experimental feature set in both the present and 1925. It follows narcissistic failed playwright Sullivan, an Alaskan in London, who feels displaced and is recovering from a brutal breakup in a haunted apartment. Creepy soft-tissue body parts appear, and Gold-Rush-era characters from Alaska (themselves colonisers) time-travel to London seeking "fresh meat." As sled-dogs and mushers descend on Seven Sisters Road, Sullivan must solve the fleshy clues to save herself. The second film, Earl’s Death (short, 2024, UK), uses outtakes from Baked Alaska to show goldminer Earl’s last moments before being cannibalised by time-traveling prostitutes.
Our two films here are complementary. The first is the experimental feature film Baked Alaska (2019, UK). It is set in both the present and in 1925 (featuring an Alaskan ex-pat in the former setting, and with 1925 goldminers colonising the U.S. territory in the latter). The lead character is narcissistic failed playwright Sullivan, an Alaskan based in present-day London who has an overwhelming surreal feeling that she is not only in the “wrong house” but also the wrong country. Sullivan is recovering from a brutal break-up with her boyfriend in a haunted London apartment, not the best of retreats. Creepy soft-tissue body parts are appearing all over town; time-travelling unsavoury characters of Gold-Rush-era Alaska converge on London in search of fresh meat. As sled-dogs and their mushers wind their way down the evil Seven Sisters Road, can fragile Sullivan piece together the meaning behind the fleshy jigsaw clues in time to save her own skin? A hallucinogenic film that just like life itself is sometimes-naturalistic, sometimes-comic, sometimes-horrific, Baked Alaska delicately/crudely explores the events that break us, form us, cannibalize us or redeem us. The second film is the short Earl’s Death (2024, UK), an experimental film we made this year from outtakes from the 2019 feature. A minor character in the bigger film, here goldminer Earl tells us in grim detail his point of view the last minutes before he dies being cannibalised by time-travelling prostitutes in a foreign land far from his home and family he left behind.