Made By Us
2026 · 10m
Directed by Hannah Dougherty
Genres: comedy, drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, surreal
An Australian artist living in France clashes with her model while working on her latest portrait, in a film shot by a one-woman cast and crew.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A one-woman film crew making a portrait drama sounds like it could be precious, but Dougherty's willingness to let the setup *be* the content—artist, model, and camera operator all colliding in real time—actually subverts the introspective artist-studio genre entirely.
The formal rigor of self-documentation as portraiture positions this within a lineage of reflexive cinema and durational performance art, though the tonal oscillation between contemplative and darkly comic suggests Dougherty is still calibrating her relationship to that tradition.
What makes this work is the structural gamble: shooting a portrait film where the filmmaker *is* the third body in the room, collapsing the distance between observer and observed in a way that forces every formal choice—framing, duration, when to cut—to do double duty as both method and content.