By Design
Playful provocateur Amanda Kramer (Please Baby Please, SIFF 2024’s So Unreal) has crafted another audacious, performance art-based piece of absurdist satire about fetish and desire, as a lonely woman (Juliette Lewis) swaps bodies with a chair, only to finally find comfort in life.
Cast member Alisa Torres scheduled to attend.
Tickets
Select showtime for pricing and tickets.
Tuesday, May 20, 2025
- Limited Availability
- On Standby
- Matinee
Wednesday, May 21, 2025
- Limited Availability
- On Standby
- Matinee
Monday, May 26 - Sunday, June 1, 2025
- Limited Availability
- On Standby
- Matinee
Director Amanda Kramer (Please Baby Please, SIFF 2024’s So Unreal) is on the hunt for truth, a truth that lies at the intersection of self-pity and desperation for meaning without the energy or sincerity to find it. In an interior precisely designed by Kramer, By Design delves into the performance daily life demands, where even silence elicits interpretation. The film’s themes unravel when Camille (Juliette Lewis, Strange Days) swaps bodies with a chair. She’s confronted by envy in her new form where adoration is freely given to a piece of furniture. Her lifeless human body is ignored or met with frustration, humorously contrasting the chair as an object of desire with Camille as a subject of exasperation.
This surrealist journey features a blend of Lynchian dissolves, campy dialogue, and dark humor, creating a rhythm uniquely Kramer’s. As characters talk at each other, every line feels like a cinematic thesis, reflecting the real-life pressure of conversation. By Design comically examines our compulsive need to project meaning into every moment and the ongoing state of being subject to others’ projections. In this idiosyncratic tale of love-at-first-sit, Kramer illustrates the perverse thrill of being inanimate and the exhaustion of being alive.
—Selena Calacat
- Director: Amanda Kramer
- Principal Cast: Juliette Lewis, Mamoudou Athie, Melanie Griffith (narr.), Samantha Mathis, Robin Tunney
- Country: USA
- Year: 2025
- Running Time: 90 min.
- Producer: Miranda Bailey, Sarah Winshall, Jacob Agger, Natalie Whalen
- Screenplay: Amanda Kramer
- Cinematographers: Patrick Meade Jones
- Editors: Benjamin Shearn
- Music: Giulio Carmassi, Bryan Scary
- Website: Official Film Website
- Filmography: So Unreal (2023), Please Baby Please (2022), Give Me Pity! (2022), Ladyworld (2018), Paris Window (2018)
- Language: English
- Format: DCP
- International Sales: Range Media Partners