SF Weekly writes: Best of San Francisco ® 2011

"Best Filmmaker Without a Pixar Contract (Yet)" published: May 18, 2011

"The brilliant experimental filmmaker Kerry Laitala is a conjurer, summoning vestigial image-remnants from ancient films and, applying her singular skills in divine manipulation, evoking the fantastical world of jagged dreams, faded realities, and shadowy fairy tales. Working with the endangered material of celluloid, she constructs handcrafted gems that explode with fantastical associations. The great contradiction embodied in her oeuvre is precisely what makes her such a singular, important artist: She devotes endless, painstaking hours to works for transient, temporal movie-going experiences. Laitala will never be co-opted or corralled by any latter-day animation companies. After all, what do they know about film?

Regarding the New Chromadepth Works, Scott Stark, filmmaker & curator writes:

"Kerry Laitala takes eye-popping visual phenomena and turns it into refined artistry, in a body of work that is playful, visually articulate and a loving homage to the fundamental magic of cinema."

Steve Polta, Artistic Director of San Francisco Cinematheque, writes:

"The films of Kerry Laitala evoke a glowing world in which spirits, memories and moldering artifacts swirl into feverish dreams recalling gothic conditions of poetry and decay. Seeming to hover on the borders between life and death, madness and sanity, these haunting alchemical films raise the dead from long slumbers to become luminous phantoms of flickering cinema. Just in from the Black Forest, Ms. Laitala will present Awake, But Dreaming, Retrospectroscope, Secure the Shadow (including its mysterious Prelude), The Adventure Parade, The Escapades of Madame X and new films Conquered, Hallowed, and Black Bile."

Brecht Andersch, Film On Film Curator, filmmaker, writer and Austin Film Society Founder, writes:

"Laitala, a mercurial creator of enchantments, has built up significant body of work exploring an at-first murky-seeming realm of shadow-play, quicksilver experiment in the wee hours, the attempt to unite sol with luna, the charming of phantasms, and sudden, but constant climaxes of pyrotechnic frenzy. In her work, the spirits dance, and grand guignol theatric spectaculars are improvised. We are guided through this preternatural terrain by an able psychopomp who transmutes celluloid lead into cinematic bullion. This extensive, but hardly exhaustive Program culminates with the performance of Little Bassy Velvet, one of Laitala's Expanded Cinema-projector performance pieces, which offer total immersion into the flickering dominion... This last has to be experienced to be believed - kinecstasy is achieved through the sum-total of cinematic apparati, and Kerry is quite the show-woman. In full disclosure, she is a friend and comrade -- she is also without doubt amongst the highest adepts of Bolex/optical-printer necromancy practicing today..."- 2009

Louis Benassi, Curator, Edinburgh International Film Festival Writes:

"Abandon yourself to a morass of imagery. This retrospective offers a chance to share in the uncanny visual associations that reside in the recesses of Kerry Laitala's imagination. Film noir, mystical surrealism, psychoanalysis, fairy tales- a cacophony of symbols and stylistic devises are used in the creation of these consistently enigmatic and richly crafted little films. Laitala is like an alchemist deeply absorbed in a process, removed from the constraints of commercialism and transient styles, working alone in her lab, searching for the unexpected poetry of cinema and the subconscious."- 2001

The Horse Hospital writes:

"San Francisco filmmaker Kerry Laitala is a gem of the cinematic underworld. Her long engagement with the avant garde processes of cinema position her as one of the most informed process-based artists working within the medium. Harnessing glimmering, fluorescing light, macabre artefacts and an array of abandoned filmic devices and conventions, her films are a deep transgression into the alchemical side of cinema."- 2010

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