LAKE FOREST PARK
dir. Kersti Jan Werdal, 2021
60 mins. United States.
In English.

SATURDAY, APRIL 19 - 5PM followed by a discussion with Kersti Jan Werdal moderated by filmmaker Lucy Kerr
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Kersti Jan Werdal's official synopsis for LAKE FOREST PARK is deceptively simple, calling it "a coming-of-age story about a group of friends dealing with the secret of a classmate's death."

Understated and enigmatic, LAKE FOREST PARK accepts the mystery of everyday life in its fragmented and observational approach. The film's empty spaces, damp greenery and austere beauty perfectly capture the environment of the film's Washington state locale, to say nothing of the real-life Lake Forest Park - a suburb just north of Seattle (and, crucially, the filmmaker's hometown.)

LAKE FOREST PARK is set in the early 21st century; Werdal told an interviewer she was drawn to the era’s lack of social media, and the fact that “Escape and connection had to be accessed through other modes.” But only the closest of watchers will register that context, as Werdal's bigger project suffuses the eternal ups and downs of the classic American adolescent experience with a palpable sense of melancholy. If not for that undercurrent of mourning - and the filmmaker's clear fascination with human behavior, down to minute details worked out beautifully with her teenage cast - LAKE FOREST PARK would deserve serious praise as a master class in Pacific Northwestern minimalism (or so-called "slow cinema".) Beyond that, Werdal's film is a haunting meditation on grief, and one of the most exciting feature debuts of the decade thus far.

“With LAKE FOREST PARK, I thought of Western music, the first five minutes before the title being the epigraph and the final scene as the coda: ‘a reverberation of something already heard’.... There are certain things I gravitate towards in the edit, such as inconclusive endings, steering away from any fabricated drama, and leaning into restraint rather than spelling out what is happening or why to the audience. I’d prefer the viewer have more agency rather than dictate how they should feel. I’d like the viewer to participate, rather than sit passively.” - Kersti Jan Werdal, interview with the Grand Cinema

"LAKE FOREST PARK was photographed on 16mm film, giving it the patina of an aged object (the lovely grain patterns and warm tone here are a far cry from the flat, hard edges and cool colors of much current digital photography). Quite simply, it’s a beautiful object to look at... A very fine film from an exciting young filmmaker." - Daniel Gorman, In Review Online

“If Gus Van Sant can be seen as an influence, this film is arguably the inverse of his PARANOID PARK, wherein a fictitious story was lent legitimacy through the application of a form of documentary realism. Here, a documentary subject is realised through a fiction film method. Closer to reinterpretation than recreation, the film becomes a fabrication responding to reality.” - Matt Turner, nonlinearities

screening with

NIGHT RUN
dir. Kersti Jan Werdal, 2023
4 mins. United States.

Memory of a night.