Dear Kevin
2023 · 5m
Directed by Kate Ferguson
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
An experimental film in 8mm and black-and-white that follows the process of reflection after the end of a relationship with the eponymous Kevin. Fragments of home, objects, canopies, and the ocean gather into an elliptical scrapbook of a narrator reordering herself through lo-fi voiceover.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Ferguson strips away narrative momentum entirely and asks us to sit with fragments—a genuinely perverse move in a culture obsessed with throughlines, though the lo-fi voiceover risks sliding into the very earnestness experimental work should interrogate.
Dear Kevin positions itself squarely in the lineage of feminist essay film and structural cinema, where the editing rhythm and monochromatic restraint become the argument itself; the 8mm grain isn't nostalgia but a deliberate formal choice that demands we feel duration.
The decision to let objects and canopies carry emotional weight instead of the narrator's voice—trusting the image over the confession—is what separates this from a hundred other relationship breakup shorts made on nothing.
Reviews
Together, the sound and image in Dear Kevin synthesise fractals of joy in the process of finding your footing in the world again. It will not be perfect, but it will be forged one painstaking grain at a time.