Untitled: Coastlines Project
Untitled: Coastlines Project
Carl Elsaesser
Carl Elsaesser
In 2014, I mailed a box of camcorders to the Larabee family—a mother, father, and two sons in Portland, Maine—who had answered my Craigslist proposal to make a co-authored film. Over two years, we passed the cameras back and forth through the mail. Each family member kept an ongoing video diary, together generating more than 30 hours of intimate, self-performed footage of dinners, fights, drives, and quiet moments alone in their rooms.
Coastlines is a feature-length hybrid film that takes this archive as its pulse, to create a Maine-based coming-of-age story. The film follows Ellis, the younger son, whose emerging queer identity is shaped in dialogue with Maine’s coastline, working landscapes, and unseen histories. Moving between his stream-of-consciousness videomaking and newly filmed sequences—ethnographic 16mm images, restaged scenes with the family, and excursions to lighthouses and coastal forts—the project treats the family itself as a medium for thinking about regional history and American privilege.
Coastlines traces how small revelations—filming yourself late at night, seeing your home from the outside, noticing who is missing from the ‘frame’—accumulate into a different understanding of inheritance. The film asks how identity is assembled from images, stories, and habits passed down across generations, and what happens when queerness and self-reflection begin to interrupt that chain. In following Ellis as he tentatively begins to narrate his own life, Coastlines probes America’s cultural adolescence and imagines a more elastic, self-aware image of Maine.
Documentary Film, Experimental Film, Film/Moving Image
2026
About Carl Elsaesser
Brooklyn, NY
Carl Elsaesser (1988, Maine, USA) is a filmmaker based between Midcoast Maine and Brooklyn, New York. In his work, Elsaesser mixes genres and materials to produce work that critically investigates the overarching presence of the historical without losing sight of individual experiences of human connection found in everyday life. His previous films have shown at festivals and institutions, including the Berlin International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel, National Gallery of Art, and the Walker Art Center. He is also the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2025. Elsaesser graduated with an BA in Film and Literature from Hampshire College and an MFA in Cinematic Arts from The University of Iowa.
Carl Elsaesser (1988, Maine, USA) is a filmmaker based between Midcoast Maine and Brooklyn, New York. In his work, Elsaesser mixes genres and materials to produce work that critically investigates the overarching presence of the historical without losing sight of individual experiences of human connection found in everyday life. His previous films have shown at festivals and institutions, including the Berlin International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel, National Gallery of Art, and the Walker Art Center. He is also the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2025. Elsaesser graduated with an BA in Film and Literature from Hampshire College and an MFA in Cinematic Arts from The University of Iowa.