FAIRCHILD

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In the Florida Everglades a teenage girl tries to navigate Summer camp and the casual traumas of young womanhood.

Miami based filmmaker Kali Kahn's debut film Fairchild offers an unflinching look at the chaos of young womanhood. Kahn's short film watches the bold yet trepidatious teenage girl Joey plunge into the sort of casual trauma that so many young women face as they enter adult life. Set in a summer camp, around other teens and older youths, It looks to issues of consent, agency and identity.

Kahn, 'In creating Fairchild, my goal was to counter all of the one-dimensional representations of sexual trauma in the media that I had been exposed to growing up. Because these stories tended to only focus on a small, violent fraction of encounters and prioritize entertainment over nuance, they severely misled my friends and I as we were coming of age and trying to construct our worldview and establish our boundaries. We didn’t have stories about the circumstances surrounding the violation, or the mundane moments leading up to it, or the psychological repercussions–only lurid depictions of the act itself, which none of our personal experiences conformed to. I wanted to create an almanac of feelings that would have been useful to my friends and I when we were younger and struggling to grasp the nebulous concept of consent. I wanted to show trauma as an intrinsically valid reality worth depicting, rather than an inconvenient afterthought.'

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