HAINT Screening Q&A: Alyssa Taylor Wendt

Screening of HAINT by Alyssa Taylor Wendt and Chamber/Antechamber Productions

The directorial debut from multimedia artist Alyssa Taylor Wendt, HAINT is an experimental narrative feature film that tells the story of a young man in Berlin trying to survive at the end of World War II. The story is a surreal journey through his desires and fears, as he simultaneously confronts and bears witness to the slow unraveling of his mother and the neighbors. Speaking to our fear of death, HAINT examines the forces behind our will to survive and what price that may carry. This line between darkness and light blurs as the relationships and stability both dissolve, where the only constant and stable element is Mortality, played with great empathy and gothic beauty by the performance artist Joseph Keckler.

Experimental Narrative Feature Video, 72 minutes long, work-in-progress

Screening and Q&A with the Artist: Wednesday, January 13, 7-9pm

In development for four years, the project was greatly inspired by the conflicting stories Wendt’s dying father told her about living through the end of the war in Germany and subsequently moving to America and serving as not only an architect, but supposedly an operative for the CIA. HAINT explores themes including monuments, decay, memory, cycles of history, perceived grandeur and parallel realities.

ALYSSA TAYLOR WENDT (Director, Writer, Producer, Art Director- HAINT) works as a filmmaker and multimedia artist and lives in Austin, Texas. She has performed on records, in films, on stage and with art while living in the West and earned her MFA in 2008 from Bard College with the Directors Award. Evolving out of a photographic and video background, she now concocts films, installations and multimedia pieces that speak about an ongoing legacy and personal cosmology through ritual appropriations, experiential spaces, collaborative work and non-linear narratives. Showing in both national and international exhibitions, she has performed at envoy gallery, Location One, Fusebox festival, St. Cecilia’s and Co-Lab Projects, among many others, and completed residencies in both Iceland and Norway. HAINT is her first feature.