Locarno Review: Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez’s Invention Holds a Seductive Power

The Film Stage

Locarno Review: Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez’s Invention Holds a Seductive Power

Grieving comes in many guises. In Courtney Stephens’ Invention, speculative fiction blends with personal history to explore the ways we process death. The subject is Callie Hernandez, an actress and filmmaker whose father died of a COVID-related illness in 2021. There’s much archival footage of the man, mostly television recordings from his times as a kind of telemarketer for new-age healing methods, but Stephens and Hernandez go one further, su…