Here is the new trailer for Invention, a hybrid film of of metafiction and archival footage from filmmakers Callie Hernandez and Courtney Stephens, making its US Premiere this weekend at the Los Angeles Festival of Movies and East Coast Premiere at New Directors/New Films.
Shot on 16mm and filmed in upstate Massachusetts, Invention is described as a wryly funny, lo-fi meta hybrid of fiction and autobiography that explores grief and American mythology. In the aftermath of a conspiracy-minded father’s unexpected death, his daughter receives his patent for an experimental healing device. Featuring archive from actress Callie Hernandez’s actual late father, Invention explores the process of grieving a complicated parent, and the filmmaking itself becomes a part of the process.
Starring in the movie alongside Callie Hernandez are James N. Kienitz Wilkins, Lucy Kaminsky, Sahm McGlynn, Tony Torn, Paul Kleiman, Tony Torn, Joe Swanberg, and Caveh Zahedi..
Directed by Courtney Stephens, Invention premiered at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival, and took the Pardo for Best Performance for Hernandez. It will open theatrically on April 18 at Metrograph theater in New York, with more dates and cities to be announced.
The film fictionalizes the aftermath of Hernandez’s father’s death using a real archive of varied TV appearances he made as an alternative health doctor in the late 90s through 2020. The fictional storyline revolves around the patent of an experimental healing device that becomes his daughter’s (played by Hernandez as the character of ‘Carrie Fernandez’) sole inheritance.
Invention is a collaboration between Stephens, whose work has been marked by a keen interest in the intersection of personal and collective histories, has become a renowned vanguard figure in nonfiction and experimental film, and Hernandez, who leads with captivating ease and has spent the last decade working across studio features and indies, expanding her focus to writing, producing and filmmaking in recent years.
Further inspired by their memories and complicated relationships with their own deceased fathers and the evolution of fringe medical culture over the past twenty five years, Invention rejects a standard narrative framework and instead succeeds at casting a genre-defying spell, with IndieWire praising it as an “open-hearted, playful and perceptive film” that “achieve[s] its own sort of magic in seeing just how far you can test the boundaries between metafiction and explicit documentary.”
In the lead up to Invention, Stephens most recently premiered another feature, John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, at the 2025 International Film Festival. Co-directed with Michael Almereyda, the unconventional biopic had its US Premiere at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight.
Watch the trailer for Invention.