THEATER – Episode 1-5

THEATER by Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff is filmed at New Theater Hollywood in Los Angeles, the black box theater space the two artists have been operating since January 2024. Blending fiction and performance documentation, THEATER uses footage shot during rehearsals of productions staged at New Theater Hollywood to construct a narrative around a character named Kennedy, played by filmmaker Leilah Weinraub, who buys a fifty-seat theater after a car accident and subsequent cash settlement.

In the film’s first three episodes, Kennedy moves into the theater and attempts to build an ensemble. In her desire for community, she faces the cult-like power it takes to keep a group together, and the unyielding hope of transformation through fame—all haunted by strikes, ghosts, exploitation, and the maddening reality of living inside of other people’s ambitions. In episodes four and five, Kennedy contends with love, heartbreak, and a landscape of performance and disappearance—two defining features of Los Angeles in 2025. Again blending fictional narrative with behind-the-scenes and rehearsal footage, the episodes also feature rehearsal footoage from plays by Stephanie LaCava, Tarren Johnson and Joel Cocks, Diamond Stingily, Klein and more, as well as an original score by MK Velsorf, the theater’s music director.

THEATER comes directly after Henkel and Pitegoff’s last film, Paradise (2020–2022), shot over three years at TV Bar, the bar they operated in Berlin-Schöneberg. Both films run off the unpredictable electricity of these spaces and the people who populate them, letting lived experiences guide the films’ narratives while asking broader questions about documentation, the performance of labor, and collective memory. Like Paradise, THEATER is shot on 16mm film and narrated via subtitles, unspooling somewhere between long-form poetry and photography.

The first three episodes of THEATER were commissioned and produced on the occasion of the artist duo's eponymous solo exhibition at Fluentum in 2024. Episodes four and five were co-commissioned by Fluentum, Berlin; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.