Visual artist Chris Peters is blending the barriers between heaven and hell, vintage home videos and narrative filmmaking, or even purgatory and existence itself.
Peters makes his feature directorial debut with “The Place Between,” starring Samantha Sloyan (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Midnight Mass”) and up-and-comer Guy Kent. Peters adapted Dante’s “Purgatorio” into an avant-garde reimagining utilizing reels of 16mm home movies from prototypical American families in the ’50s and ’60s. The original footage was restored in 5K, with Peters creating a ghost story set in a bygone era about a man whose sins finally caught up to him.
Per the film‘s official synopsis, “The Place Between” “captures a man’s passage through purgatory toward redemption. Dan Allenford (Kent) is a careless sinner, murdered at the hand of his own vices. As Dan traverses a bewildering purgatory landscape, drifting as a ghostly voyeur in and out of people’s lives, he soon begins to piece together clues of the person he once was when he encounters Beatrice (Sloyan), a mystifying woman whose heart to which he remains forever bound, even in death.”
“This was a true experiment in filmmaking and I am so grateful to Guy Kent and Samantha Sloyan, whose memorable performances bring such beauty and life to the film, and to Carla Patullo, whose haunting score said so much more than I could with just words and images,” Peters told IndieWire.
The film is scored by 2024 Grammy Award Winner Carla Patullo, and will premiere as part of the Brooklyn Film Festival’s Experimental program.
Peters has previously debuted short films that incorporated artificial intelligence and various mediums; the shorts have screened at numerous Academy Award-qualifying festivals around the world, including Slamdance, and Aesthetica, Rhode Island. He also won the Peter Wilde Award at the 2020 Ann Arbor Film Festival.
As for the inspiration for “The Place Between” as his feature debut, Peters said in a statement that the found footage feature literally was crafted by finding the reels themselves.
“I slowly started acquiring various reels from estates, first struck by the colors, the beautiful look of Kodachrome, and then by the true stories that unfolded before me,” Peters said. “I started imagining a story that would tie them all together, a story of a lost spirit forced to observe the lives of others. I ended up acquiring more than 30 hours of 16mm. The breakthrough came when I discovered more than 10 hours from a single family, which provided a consistent set of characters to craft this narrative around.”
Peters produces the film through his Lux Perpetua banner and Sunday Boling, CSA served as Casting Director, who discovered Kent out of hundreds of auditions. Peters’ art is has been exhibited at LACMA and museums and galleries around the world. His largest private collection is held by Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro.
“The Place Between” premieres at the 27th Brooklyn Film Festival. Check out the teaser, exclusively available on IndieWire, below.
