Project: The Shape of Guy
Role: Director & Producer
Subject: Guy Kettelhack
Production Company: Due South Media
Format: Short Documentary (12 min)

Overview

The Shape of Guy is an intimate portrait of East Village artist and poet Guy Kettelhack, a seventy-one-year-old creative whose whimsical drawings reveal a world of joy, memory, and resilience. As he faces the possibility of an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, the film captures his artistry, his wit, and his spirit in a moment where both legacy and mortality are at stake.

The Challenge

There is a disappearing generation of LGBTQ+ elders whose stories risk being lost. Without children or grandchildren to pass them down, these histories will vanish unless they are captured. As a filmmaker approaching fifty myself, I felt an urgency to preserve these voices. With The Shape of Guy, the challenge was to not only document Guy’s story but also to convey the larger cultural weight of what it means to age, to forget, and to leave behind a body of work.

The Process

Filmed over several months in New York from 2022 into 2023, the project combined:

• Verité footage of Guy in his East Village home and studio.

• Archival materials from Guy’s personal collection and from New York in the 1950s–70s.

• Intimate interviews with Guy, blending his reflections with imagery of his daily rituals of drawing and painting.

• Visual style inspired by Roger Deakins (Revolutionary Road) and Emmanuel Lubezki (The Tree of Life), shot with natural light and softened through Pro Mist filters to echo the hazy contours of memory.

The result is a film that feels as whimsical and ephemeral as the art at its center—dreamlike, yet deeply grounded in lived experience.

The Impact

The Shape of Guy explores universal themes of creativity, aging, autonomy, and memory through the lens of one man’s life. The film is designed to resonate with:

• The Queer community, especially younger audiences learning from elders.

• Those living with Alzheimer’s and their families, caregivers, and medical professionals.

• Artists and art lovers, invited into Guy’s whimsical, deeply personal world.

The film is also intended for special screenings paired with gallery-style exhibitions of Guy’s art, creating a dialogue between the work on screen and the work on paper.

Reflection

The Shape of Guy is more than a short documentary—it is a preservation of spirit. Guy’s story embodies both the fragility and resilience of human memory. For me, the project stands as an urgent reminder of the stories we must save, and a testament to the power of art to outlast even the most profound uncertainties of aging and illness.