Our two films are complementary. The first, Baked Alaska (feature, 2019, UK), is an experimental feature set in both the present and 1925. It follows narcissistic failed playwright Sullivan, an Alaskan in London, who feels displaced and is recovering from a brutal breakup in a haunted apartment. Creepy soft-tissue body parts appear, and Gold-Rush-era characters from Alaska (themselves colonizers) time-travel to London seeking "fresh meat." As sled-dogs and mushers descend on Seven Sisters Road, Sullivan must solve the fleshy clues to save herself. The second film, Earl’s Death (short, 2024, UK), uses outtakes from Baked Alaska to show goldminer Earl’s last moments before being cannibalized by time-traveling prostitutes.

Our two films here are complementary. The first is the experimental feature film Baked Alaska (2019, UK). It is set in both the present and in 1925 (featuring an Alaskan ex-pat in the former setting, and with 1925 goldminers colonising the U.S. territory in the latter). The lead character is narcissistic failed playwright Sullivan, an Alaskan based in present-day London who has an overwhelming surreal feeling that she is not only in the “wrong house” but also the wrong country. Sullivan is recovering from a brutal break-up with her boyfriend in a haunted London apartment, not the best of retreats. Creepy soft-tissue body parts are appearing all over town; time-travelling unsavoury characters of Gold-Rush-era Alaska converge on London in search of fresh meat. As sled-dogs and their mushers wind their way down the evil Seven Sisters Road, can fragile Sullivan piece together the meaning behind the fleshy jigsaw clues in time to save her own skin? A hallucinogenic film that just like life itself is sometimes-naturalistic, sometimes-comic, sometimes-horrific, Baked Alaska delicately/crudely explores the events that break us, form us, cannibalize us or redeem us. The second film is the short Earl’s Death (2024, UK), an experimental film we made this year from outtakes from the 2019 feature. A minor character in the bigger film, here goldminer Earl tells us in grim detail his point of view the last minutes before he dies being cannibalised by time-travelling prostitutes in a foreign land far from his home and family he left behind.

Name: Kathleen Bryson and Kimmo Möykky
Born — Location: Alaska, USA—United Kingdom; Finland—United Kingdom

KB: I aim to bring insight into displacement, e.g. B.A.'s limited outsider view tacitly ignoring displaced Alaska Native peoples while also acknowledging immigrants' existential struggles in foreign environments. KM: I left Finland seeking freedom and creativity from parochial homogeneity. London offers this yet the city only opens up through language; I felt unheard at first. I’ve resisted the 'immigrant' label, but now I’m reconsidering it.
I’m Anna Andreeva, a theater, film, and voice actor who has always despised injustice. I lived, studied, and worked in Moscow, where I had professional plans, but after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I could no longer stay. Initially, I joined protests, then lived in fear in a closed apartment. In November 2022, I left for Armenia with director Maya Dorozhenko, and we started working on the anti-war monodrama HANNAH. Later, I moved to Tbilisi, where we performed HANNAH again, with proceeds going to Ukrainian relief. Now, I live in Tbilisi, taking on new professions to survive. I hope my emigrant story will continue and find its right path. I do not want to return to a country where people are brainwashed and enslaved. I haven’t seen my parents in over two years, and I fear they may die before seeing light triumph over darkness.

Kathleen Bryson, an Alaskan director, attended the Berlinale Talent Campus for Directing and Screenwriting, based on her feature The Viva Voce Virus (co-directed with Kimmo Möykky), praised as a “campy new classic” by The Oregonian. Kathleen holds an MA in Independent Film and Video. She is known for DIY no-budget cinema, with solo Creative Commons stop-motion feature projects Doctor Bitcoin Makes the Magic (2022), The Wonderful Thing (2023) and Parhelion (2024). As a writer, Kathleen has had three novels published (her latest: The Stagtress by Fugure State Press, 2019), alongside 100+ short stories and poems in various publications. Her visual work as a painter has led to 10 solo exhibitions, including Once Upon a Spacetime at London’s Royal Institution (2019). Kathleen’s wilderness-themed artworks contributed to the visual aesthetic of Baked Alaska via use of overlays. By day, she is an evolutionary anthropologist, exploring themes of ingroups/outgroups, empathy, sexuality, nature-wilderness and virtual reality in both her scientific work and artistic projects.

Kimmo Möykky is a Finnish filmmaker based in London. He studied Theatre in Literature at the University of Helsinki, followed by a BA in Film and Video at London College of Printing and a Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning. He is a digital media teacher at Central Saint Martin's College. Kimmo also teaches short courses at CityLit in London. His first feature, The Viva Voce Virus (2008), was co-directed and co-produced with Kathleen Bryson. His film The Sons of Ra (2019), a partly animated live-action horror, was made in collaboration with Kevin Rowe. Kimmo’s ongoing projects include experimental movement-based short films showcased on Instagram.

Kathleen: I grew up in a family with a generational dark sense of humour about death (my grandfather collected Charles Addams cartoon hardback books published by the New Yorker in the 1950s). After I started to experience more real people dying in my life as I grew older, my enjoyment of macabre humour has dampened a bit. Most of my experience with deaths of beloveds has been quite sudden — sepsis, car crashes, accidents — and on a more personal level for myself, unanticipated but multiple miscarriages. Experiencing the news of deaths of those whom I have known and loved knocks me out emotionally for weeks at a time. Reading about the deaths of strangers is more detached for me since Covid (I think I became numbed), but I get the same exhausted punched-out feeling when the stranger-deaths are on a large scale (war, natural disasters) or caused by human cruelty. I am not an atheist but also not a practitioner of any organised religion, and so I am curious about what happens after death, as I do suspect (even scientifically — my day job is that of an evolutionary biologist) there might be something interesting indeed (and hopefully something positive). I do love reading about positive NDEs (near-death experiences), especially those by Bill Letson.