Elusive Connections RITUAL AND RECONSTRUCTION IN JAYDEN STEVENS’ A FAMILY
Communication is commodified in A Family (Jayden Stevens, 2019). Its lonely central figure, Emerson (Pavlo Lehenkyi), holds auditions to find himself a set of parents and siblings whose paid interactions will be scripted and rehearsed before being performed for their employer. Each mundane family ‘event’ is greedily recorded by the protagonist’s bulky home-movie camera; it is clear that the process of producing a record of these interactions is of paramount importance. In fact, when the camera runs out of batteries, the entire production shuts down with immediate effect. Most of the characters remain nameless throughout, reduced to the essential signifiers of ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘sister’ and ‘brother’, and Emerson is only interested in his scripted dialogues; any interaction beyond the scope of his constructed reality is off limits. This dynamic is eventually inverted when Ericka (Liudmyla Zamydra), the actor he has hired to play his ‘sister’, recruits him for the role of substitute ‘father’ in her own troubled family.
A Family is Stevens’ first feature-length film, and was partially subsidised by the MIFF Premiere Fund; shot in Ukraine, it is one of This idea of connection was a central trope right from the beginning of the production, as Stevens explains:
