A Photographic Memory
Interview with Director Rachel Elizabeth Seed
Film is distributed by Zeitgeist Films in association with Kino Lorber and opens June 14-16 in Los Angeles; June 20 in Chicago; June 27 in New York City - National rollout continues throughout the summer
Describe the film for us in your own words.
A Photographic Memory is an intimate, genre-bending portrait of my attempt to piece together a picture of my mother, a daring journalist I never knew. In the film over the period of a decade, I uncover the vast archive that my mother Sheila Turner Seed produced, including her lost interviews with iconic photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks, Cecil Beaton, Bruce Davidson, Lisette Model, and others, in an attempt to build a posthumous relationship with her that I’d longed for my whole life. The film explores memory, legacy, living with loss, and what it means to live balancing one’s art and personal life.
What drew you to this story?
In my photography and creative work, I am driven by the desire for connection. Perhaps this is because my mother died when I was a baby; I’m always seeking to reconcile this loss in my life. It's this drive that inspired me to make my debut feature documentary, A Photographic Memory.
My work as an artist, photographer, photo editor, curator, writer, arts community founder, and cinematographer have greatly informed my knowledge and aesthetic sensibility in the media arts, paving the way for this film project and for my transition from photography to filmmaking. From 2004-2011 I created an audio-visual series about motherless women, interviewing and photographing 40 women and girls around the world, but it wasn’t until I turned the camera on my life in A Photographic Memory that I began to make sense of my loss. As I just turned the age my mother was when she died, it is also a personally timely project. I hope for the result to be cathartic for myself and for an audience who relates to losing someone close or being estranged from a parent. At the same time, I aim to memorialize my mother’s legacy as a woman ahead of her time who contributed to the canon of photography history. She died in her prime but left an undeniable mark through her work and great compassion for humanity. This legacy would be forgotten without this film.
What do you want people to think about?
I want people to see themselves in the story and to see avenues for their own healing when they watch it, or, if they are photographers, I love when they come up to me after a screening and say, “Watching your film made me inspired to start shooting again.” This has happened many times since the film premiered last year and it’s the most gratifying thing for me as a filmmaker.
What was the biggest challenge in making this?
Where to start! Since I was wearing both director and producer hats, there were very different challenges under each role. As a director, the greatest challenge was getting back in touch with my feelings – in order to develop my character’s script in the film, I needed to be tuned into this. And I quickly realized I had no idea how I felt about my mother’s absence, other than sad. The reason is that it’s all I’d ever known because I didn’t remember her. And also, it had been easier to just keep going and live my life and bury the feelings, but that didn’t work for the film. Excavating my feelings required time at Labs such as the Sundance Edit + Story Labs, time in therapy, and intensive work with my editor bouncing writing ideas off each other.
As a producer the challenge was raising the money to make it. This involved months of grantwriting, pitching, meeting funders and building those relationships, and so on. It’s all hard work and you have to be totally determined and persistent to make a film.
What was the development process? How did you get green lit?
It was an independent production that started with just me and my big idea, and some googling about “how to make a documentary budget and treatment.” When I began in 2011 I hardly knew anyone in the industry as I had been a photographer and writer for many years. I knew the CEO of a large company who had been my mother’s boss, and I wrote a letter to him in spring 2011 asking for advice. Three months later I got a call to come in for a meeting, and he offered me $25,000 to start the project. That was my first lesson in the maxim, “If you want money, ask for advice, and if you want advice, ask for money.” It’s not always the way it goes, but in this case it was. What I had going for me is that I was pretty clear from the start what the film was about, and I got access early on for well-known photographers my mom had interviewed. So I was able to build off of these strengths. I also had always been a writer, so written pitches came naturally to me.
What inspired you to become a storyteller?
Both my parents had careers in nonfiction writing, photography and filmmaking, and before I was even aware of that I had the desire to write and tell stories from as early as I can remember. As a kid, I wrote plays, made up fake TV programs where I was the host, wrote in my journal, and wrote short stories. It was a natural form of expression for me then, which developed into a career in photography, writing and film as an adult. I have never doubted this path.
What’s the best and worst advice you've received?
Best advice: Follow your intuition.
Worst advice: Don’t question authority.
What advice do you have for other female creatives?
Not to be caught up on being a female creative. While my creative women friends and I have nurtured incredibly supportive private spaces together to incubate our projects and collaborate, I feel most empowered when I’m not putting myself in the category of being female. I am a creative person first. I don’t ever think of myself as a “woman artist” because it doesn’t make any sense to me. I do think it’s very important to support each other, help each other get hired, and build strong relationships in a challenging industry, so I think being part of creative collectives, attending events and building relationships in person is one of the best ways to make sure your work gets made.
Name your favorite woman directed film and why.
There are many, but a recent favorite is Portrait of a Lady On Fire. I LOVE this film and the director Céline Sciamma. It is bold, raw, gorgeous, sexy and kind of life changing! A truly incredible film. It also has one of my favorite music scenes ever in a film – the bonfire scene.
Feel free to share anything else you would like people to know about this film.
I’m excited to have many more screenings coming up this spring and summer in LA, Chicago, NY, Seattle and beyond! They are listed here: https://zeitgeistfilms.com/film/a-photographic-memory
I love connecting with people in photography and film so feel free to hit me up on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/soignesong/
About the Filmmaker:
Originally from London, Rachel Elizabeth Seed is an LA-based nonfiction storyteller working in film, photography, and writing. Her debut feature film, A Photographic Memory, is a New York Times Critic’s Pick and was called “one of the best docs of the year” by RogerEbert.com. It was awarded a 2025 Truer Than Fiction Spirit Award and was nominated for a 2025 Cinema Eye Honors Award. Rachel’s work has been supported by the Sundance Institute, Chicken + Egg Films, NYFA, Field of Vision, the Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, the Jewish Film Institute, Jewish Story Partners and the IFP/Gotham Labs, among others. Formerly a photo editor at New York Magazine, her photography has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography, and she was a cameraperson on several award-winning feature documentaries. Rachel is co-founder and executive director of the Brooklyn Documentary Club, a NYC film collective with more than 300 members.