Sollers Point
Matt Porterfield is a film director and screenwriter working predominantly in Baltimore, where he was born and raised. His stories focus on the regionally specific and routine aspects of working class characters’ lives, blending documentary and narrative technique with formal rigor.
Artist BioThe third in a trilogy of feature films set in the northeast Baltimore neighborhood where Matt Porterfield was raised, Sollers Point examines the daily life of a 35-year-old man who is under house arrest for drug charges and living with his father. The lines between fiction and nonfiction are heightened through the formal techniques of documentary and narrative realism, the use of existing locations and a largely non-professional supporting cast. Amy Belk was a collaborator on this project from 2012-2013.
Matt Porterfield
Baltimore, MD
Matt Porterfield is a film director and screenwriter working predominantly in Baltimore, where he was born and raised. His stories focus on the regionally specific and routine aspects of working class characters’ lives, blending documentary and narrative technique with formal rigor. Porterfield has written and directed four feature films, Hamilton (2006), Putty Hill (2011), I Used to Be Darker (2013) and Sollers Point (2018). His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Harvard Film Archive and has screened at the Whitney Biennial, the Walker Arts Center, Anthology Film Archives, Centre Pompidou, Cinematheque Française, and film festivals such as Sundance, the Berlinale, San Sebastien, Rotterdam, and SXSW. In summer 2014, he wrote and directed his first narrative short, Take What You Can Carry, with a grant from the Harvard Film Study Center. It premiered in the Shorts Competition at the Berlinale in 2015 and screened at Lincoln Center’s second annual Art of the Real series. The following year, he co-produced and co-wrote Gaston Solnicki’s first fiction feature, Kékszakállú, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. As a producer, Porterfield has participated in IFP’s No Borders, Cinemart, FIDLab, the Berlin Coproduction Market and the Venice Production Bridge. Porterfield is a Rubys grantee, the recipient of a Wexner Center Artists Residency, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He teaches screenwriting, critical theory and film production at Johns Hopkins University.