John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, by Courtney Stephens and Michael Almereyda
John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office
"...what sets apart Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens’s John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office is that the professor isn’t the documentary’s only focus. Lilly’s experiments on interspecies communication are secondary to the discourses they were embedded in, which is to say Earth Coincidence isn’t a biopic so much as a study of a few tumultuous decades in US history, and how ideas––even and especially the most absurd––can seep into culture." -- Leonardo Goi, The Film Stage
Courtney Stephens is the director of four feature films. The American Sector (with Pacho Velez) follows slabs of the Berlin Wall installed around the US, and was named one of the best films of 2021 in The New Yorker. Terra Femme, composed of amateur travel footage shot by women in the early 20th century, was a New York Times critic’s pick and has toured widely as a live performance. John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (with Michael Almereyda) explores the life of neuroscientist and psychedelics pioneer John C. Lilly, and Invention is a hybrid fiction film about an esoteric healing device that premiered at Locarno. Her films have been exhibited at MoMA, The National Gallery of Art, The Barbican, Fondazione Prada, Jeu de Paume, ICA London, and film festivals including the Berlinale, Rotterdam, Viennale, New Directors/New Films, IDFA, Visions Du Réel, Morelia, and the New York Film Festival. Her work has been released theatrically in the US, UK, and France, and she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, and grants from the Sloan Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Art. She has co-curated the miniature cinema Veggie Cloud since 2014, and organized film programs for The Getty, Museum of the Moving Image, Flaherty NYC, and Human Resources. Her writing has appeared in Film Comment, BOMB, Filmmaker, The New Inquiry, and Cabinet.
John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office
Written and Directed by Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens
2025, digital color, sound, 89 minutes
Produced by Taylor Hess and Jesse Miller
Narrated by Chloë Sevigny
With a stunning array of archival images and sounds, renowned filmmakers Courtney Stephens and Michael Almereyda explore the life and ideas of intrepid mid-century utopian neuroscientist, John C. Lilly, whose unorthodox experimentations into human and animal consciousness were controversial in methodology but far-reaching in intent.
Featuring startling archival images and audio interviews, and with a narration voiced by Chloë Sevigny, this collaboration between filmmakers Courtney Stephens and Michael Almereyda charts a cornucopia of ideas and impressions of a long-lost era in US counterculture, a time when literally anything seemed possible.
Wildly intrepid neuroscientist John C. Lilly was part of a constellation of mid-twentieth century utopian scientists, who worked at the nexus of psychology, ethnology, psychoanalysis, animal studies and psychedelic experimentation. Lilly’s ideas around society and the potential of human (and animal) awareness – notably his highly unorthodox (NASA-funded!) LSD experimentations with dolphins – were radical for the time and seem undoubtedly alien from today’s perspective. However Stephens and Almereyda recognise their subject as “a person who, with considerable fluidity, traded scientific investigation for adventures in mysticism, fantasy, and showmanship” and offer a sensitive interpretation of his far-reaching concepts for contemporary times.
Poetic and essayistic, John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office brings together both filmmakers’ fascination with scientific experimentation and perception, to animate a historical era due for reconsideration, despite the studies’ often methodological flaws, as it anticipates today’s similarly expanded considerations of consciousness. – Michelle Carey, IFFR, https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2025/films/john-lilly-and-the-earth-coincidence-control-office