
JESS LEE | CANADA | 2023 | 18 MIN |ENGLISH
Five thousand twenty five walks. Fifty-two miles of floors mopped. Seventy hours watching movie stars kiss. Alice, a headstrong elder dyke, navigates environmentally induced illness while she contends with her unique notion of legacy.
Jess Lee (she/her) is a director, screenwriter and script supervisor based in Montréal, Canada. Her short film Sweet Affliction screened at festivals internationally, including image+nation30 (2017) where it won the Prix du Public award. Her experimental films and music videos have also been showcased internationally, garnering over 28,000 views. She is currently developing her first feature. Jess Lee is invested in creating expansive character studies that offer complicated stories of human error. With a propensity toward maximalism, Lee’s films are off kilter, awkwardly funny and intimately connected.
LANDFILL is a film about human error and human processing, how we navigate capitalism, neoliberalism and health in a climate of environmental decline. It explores the ego in relation to how one is perceived and considers stubbornness as a tool for remaining relevant – if only as a real pain in the ass. LANDFILL is busy. Maximal in an effort to both warm the viewer to the eccentricities of Alice’s world view, but also as a mechanism for distraction and avoidance. Alice plays games with others but also with herself. She diffuses frustrations and self-soothes, positioning herself at one with an evolutionary cycle much greater than her own and contending with her impending mortality through the process. My work is invested in creating representation and perspectives on queerness that are subtle and expansive. I work to create worlds in which queerness is something daily; assumed, banal and embodied, offering alternatives to a cultural fixation on stories of struggle and desire. LANDFILL contributes to this effort, challenging the viewer to consider the values of life, legacy, priority and purpose outside of their usual prescriptions.
Jess Lee, Jeanne-Marie Poulain, Anaëlle Béglet, Line Sander Egede, Irène Bessone
Jess Lee
Yan Clément










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