Jacob Kessler is an experimental nonfiction filmmaker, educator, and programmer based in Iowa City, IA. He holds an MFA in Documentary Media from Northwestern University.
Jacob’s films have screened in festivals and cinemas across the globe including CUFF (Chicago), Mimesis (Boulder), LUFF (Lausanne), Doc Films (Chicago), La Lumière Collective (Montreal), Baltic Analog Lab (Riga), Spectacle (NYC), NoBudge (streaming), and more. They have been awarded the Prix du Jury at Grain Urbain (Paris) and Best-in-Show at ICDOCS (Iowa City).
Jacob is currently Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa and Programming Director for the Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival.
Artist Statement
How do the ways we narrate our lives shape the world around us? My body of work poses this question in a number of different communities, locales, and domains. Working at the intersection of experimental film and ethnography, my films engage in highly collaborative and spontaneous co-creation with their participants.
By working with participants to shape the way that their own stories are told, I reject unilateral power dynamics in filmmaking and explore the role of fiction as a response to lived experience. I hope to capture the contrasts and affinities between these fictions and the unexpected events inherent to fieldwork to examine their relationship with the real.
Formally, my films address my own presence as the filmmaker by highlighting gaps of visibility, technical aberrations/artifacts, and out-of-placeness to reflect on tension between subjectivities which occurs in ethnographic filmmaking and explore more sensorial forms of reflexivity. In the dialog my films create between filmmaker, subject, and form, I hope to present a cinematic lifeworld fostering empathy and solidarity.