Dirty blonde woman with a black jean jacket and striped shirt sitting on a staircase with a black and white angular mural in the background.

Lori Felker

Chicago, IL

Lori Felker is a filmmaker, teacher, programmer, and performer. Felker eschews any particular style or genre in favor of letting content and concerns guide form. Her projects have manifested themselves as 16mm films, videos, websites, installations, photography, short stories, and performances. Felker’s love of every facet of filmmaking has led her to collaborate as a cinematographer, editor, or actor for various artists and directors and work as a film programmer for film festivals, such as Slamdance. Her award-winning films screen internationally, recently at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in Germany, Uppsala Short Film Festival in Sweden, Message to Man in St Petersburg, Russia, NewFilmmakers in Los Angeles, and Anthology Film Archives in NYC. Spontaneous (2020) and Discontinuity (2016) are available on The Criterion Channel and Patient (2023) has received attention and insightful critical reviews from ten media outlets.

Felker is the recipient of various grants/fellowships including a Fulbright (Berlin), a Wexner Center Residency, and a Milwaukee Film/Brico Forward Fund. She has been commissioned to collaborate and make videos for Media Burn Video Archive (Chicago), Lab 80-Cinescatti Archives (Italy) and Tura New Music (Australia). Felker has been teaching at the college level since 2007 and started as an Assistant Professor in the School of Cinematic Arts at DePaul University in 2022. Working with students and audiences is an integral part of Felker’s creative practice.

Patient


Lori Felker’s films, writings, and other projects study the ineloquent, frustrating, and chaotic qualities of human interaction and have explored empathy, discontinuity, grief, and multiple dimensions.

Artist Bio

Patient is a feature film written and to-be-directed by Lori Felker that involves elements of autofiction and improvisation. Reggie, a woman in her 30s, bruises and scrapes her face in a fall. This is distracting and creates confusion in her job as a Standardized Patient (SP), in which she acts as a patient for student doctors learning bedside manner. After going to a real doctor, a nurse inappropriately shares partial CT scan information that leads Reggie to assume she has a brain tumor. Reggie worries as her physical and emotional pain overlap with the ailments she performs for her job. From there, the narrative evolves and complicates as Reggie has to figure out how to wait and how to deal with her lack of money, her unhelpful parents, and her best friend’s shifting priorities. Many of the medical and familial events in the film are very similar to my own experiences.

Alongside Reggie’s story, the film includes examinations with both fictional and actual standardized patients and student doctors. After observing at a few medical centers, Felker made a short film that is currently in festivals also called Patient, and Felker now knows that a film that reveals these layers of pain, empathy, performance, and reality causes audiences to reflect deeply on their own experiences. Patient is about simultaneity, contradictions, and layers. We cry while we’re teaching, have visible scars from our past while we’re pretending to be someone else, we think we might die and we have to be on hold with an insurance company. In the feature, the main character of Reggie will act as a guide through this mess. Amidst contradictions, interruptions, and absurdity, Reggie will have to decide who she can talk to and who she will listen to.


Award Year
2025
Status

In Progress