Atlanta-based Liaison Pictures has joined France’s Because the Night Productions on documentary feature “Behemoth Ann Holds a Seance”, which is participating in Locarno’s Match Me! networking platform. The film follows filmmaker Isidore Bethel and his mother Vicki as they seek to honour the work of Isidore’s late father, artist Arthur Douglas Thayer, by staging an exhibition of his crocheted creatures at Atlanta’s airport. The partnership matters because it brings an American production and finance company into an international project about grief, art and family memory.

Directed by Isidore Bethel, Vicki Bethel and Daniel Hymanson, the film portrays the family facing posthumous bureaucracy, debt and domestic pressures after Thayer’s unexpected death. Producer Anne-Laure Berteau said the filmmaking process helps turn sorrow into a story connecting the living, ghosts, art and everyday life. Liaison Pictures was founded in 2023 by John Henry Hinkel and Andrew Ostapchenko; Hinkel has known Vicki and Isidore Bethel for decades and said the Atlanta-set project expands ideas of what films can be made in the city.