| B | Fantastic Fest 2024 |
It’s not so much that this film was “undefinable,” but it wasn’t a narrative and it wasn’t a documentary. It was a collection of some of the videos that this girl, Kati Kelli, had filmed over the years for her YouTube channel.
She passed away in 2019 from a severe asthma attack. Her boyfriend and a movie director (Jane Schoenbrun, I Saw the TV Glow), who was a fan and had recently started working with her, wanted to commemorate her work. They decided the best way to do that was to let her “speak for herself,” through a curated collection of some of her videos.
This girl was hilarious, and experimental, and overall very talented. You can still get to her YouTube channel (see below) and see for yourself. My favorite of the ones included in the compilation was DEEP Poetry.
At the end of the film, they included her first short film: Full Body Removal Surgery (I hope I’ve remembered that title correctly). Which she scripted, cast several of her friends in, filmed, and edited. In fact, she completed it just days before her death. And it was produced by Schoenbrun. So this feels like a case of a major talent starting the climb towards her breakthrough and tragically cut down before she got there. It would have been really interesting to see what content she would have been producing by now.
