Lori Felker

UTURE LANGUAGE: The Dimensions of VON LMO | sound | colour | HD | 85mins | 2018 | USA | Montréal premiere

FUTURE LANGUAGE: The Dimensions of VON LMO is a distorted portrait of an artist that explores storytelling, ego, delusion, conviction and memory. VON LMO is a musician/artist and self-proclaimed alien-hybrid who was a part of the late 70s New York No Wave music scene. Between trips to his home planet of Strazar and multi-dimensional travel, VON has also spent some very real time in prison and on the streets of Earth. Challenged with translating his Future Language for audiences across the galaxy, Lori, our filmmaker and VON LMO fan, gets sucked into VON’s orbit and finds herself lost in his story.

Trailer : https://vimeo.com/259495041

“Felker’s film, eight years in the making, is an impressive work of both archaeology and craftsmanship that uses every stylistic trick in the book—from archival footage to animation—to chronicle Von LMO’s many rises and falls; but the director’s masterstroke was allowing the true subject of the movie to become her complicated friendship with this weirdo. Future Language is as much a thorny love letter from one eccentric artist to another as it is a warts-and-all portrait of a gifted musician haunted by demons of his own making.” Michael G. Smith, Time Out Chicago

“Though an undeniably affectionate, sometimes awestruck tribute, the film wisely describes a more elliptical orbit around its subject than most rock profiles—over the years, VON LMO seems to come in and out of focus not only to Felker and to us, but to himself. Her trajectory not only helps shield the filmmaker from her subject’s sometimes disturbing volatility, it also lends FUTURE LANGUAGE a peculiar rhythm, one that mirrors the flux of its own making. Most importantly, her ability to step back preserves the quantum of VON LMO’s essential strangeness, which utterly confounds conventional rise-and-fall-and-rise biographical structures anyway. Thrilling and sometimes frightening up close, the dimensions of VON LMO become both more spooky, and more affecting, at a distance.” Michael Metzger, Cine-file

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Lori Felker is a Chicago-based filmmaker/artist, teacher, programmer, and performer. Her films and videos attempt to study the ineloquent, oppositional, delusional, frustrating, and chaotic qualities of human interaction. She loves every facet of filmmaking and has worked as a cinematographer, editor, and actor for artists and directors such as Jerzy Rose, Melika Bass, Jesse McLean, and Geof Oppenheimer. She has also spent beloved, valuable time as a Festival Coordinator and programmer for the Chicago Underground Film Festival and Roots & Culture Gallery and as a projectionist at the Gene Siskel Film Center. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Film Department at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Lori works in a variety of mediums and has shown her work internationally at festivals and spaces including the Rotterdam International Film Festival; NYFF: Views from the Avant-Garde; VideoEx, Zurich; Slamdance, Park City, UT; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Montreal; Curtas Vila do Conde Film Festival, Portugal; Glass Curtain Gallery, Chicago; LA Filmforum; BAMcinemaFest, Brooklyn; and Space Gallery, Pittsburgh. She is an Illinois Arts Council Artists Grant recipient, a Wexner Center Artist in Residence and a Fulbright Fellow.