Genre
Synopsis
KILLFACE is a conceptual, sensory driven meditation on female strength, stamina, struggle and an invitation into a new perspective on female power. It's both a short documentary film intended for the screen, and an immersive video installation, utilizing 360 spatial audio. Filmed up close and wide, with no narration, no backstory, and very little dialogue, the project observes featherweight Muay Thai champion Natalie “Kill Face” Morgan’s ‘fight camp’ training. Privileging the sound of Morgan’s breath and keeping her centered in the frame, KILLFACE intentionally limits what we are able to see and hear, and invites audiences to experience an exhaustive and visceral exploration of getting strong and training for a fight. It also puts attention to how gendered violence echoes within the act of observing women engaged in combat, even when it's not present in the story.
For the installation, KILLFACE explodes onto four walls, enveloping the audience. We’re so close that at times the camera loses Morgan. We go searching only to find fragmented images falling in and out of focus. Feet in motion, bodies punching, a jump rope slapping the mat. She’s fast, agile and evades the camera like she does her sparring partner. Sometimes our only glimpses of Morgan are wincing and clawing herself out from within a clinch hold. And sometimes our camera is so steady in its observation, she’s all we can see. The soundscape is programmed to travel across speakers set in a sphere. Audiences don’t listen to, they listen from within the experience.
Bio
Kate Trumbull-LaValle is a Peabody Award winning documentary filmmaker. Her directorial debut with longtime collaborator Joanna Sokolowski, "Ovarian Psycos" (2016), had its world premiere at SXSW 2016 and was picked up for a national broadcast in 2017 on the Emmy award winning series, Independent Lens (PBS). In 2018 Kate and Joanna directed two one-hour broadcast films for public television, "Artist and Mother" (Artbound/KCET) and "City Rising: The Informal Economy" (KCET). Both films were nominated for an LA Area Emmy, and both titles won LA Press Awards. In 2019 Kate co-produced the groundbreaking 5-part PBS series, "Asian Americans" (2020) which won a Peabody Award. Kate is currently a producer for Walidah Imarisha's Afro-futurist hybrid documentary, "Space to Breathe", supported by Working Films and the International Documentary Association. In between directing and producing longform films, Kate directs social issue, nonfiction broadcast and digital content for nonprofits, social issue campaigns, and communications firms. Kate teaches documentary film at California State University, Long Beach, is a UC Berkeley Human Rights Fellow (2010) and graduated with an M.A. from the Social Documentation Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Credits
Director of Photography - Helki Frantzen
Composer - Jimmy LaValle
