A struggling painter sets out on a do-or-die journey to paint the Mojave. With 72 hours to capture a perfect desert landscape, she finds herself disrupted by the hostile environment and a bizarre monolith that won’t seem to go away.
CANADA/USA // 2025 // 15’ // 2:1 // ENGLISH
Director’s Statement
En Plein Air explores the journey of an artist grappling with the complexities of perfectionism during her search for authentic expression. Drawing from my own experiences as a filmmaker and painter, I believe true artistic growth stems from one’s ability to adapt and embrace the unexpected. This film, centred around a painter’s 72-hour odyssey in the Mojave Desert, reflects that process–of confronting rigidity and learning to surrender to the unknown.
Her disciplined methods are tested by the harsh desert environment and the mysterious presence of a monolith that persistently disrupts her process. Through her struggle with this enigmatic rock, the painter’s journey becomes a metaphor for the battle with perfectionism and the need to find one’s own voice. As a cinematographer, I approach narrative with a documentary eye. Using a Dogma-inspired approach, we filmed primarily during the fleeting windows of sunrise and sunset. This was challenging, yet deeply rewarding as a way to ground the character in a real moment of time.
I wrote, lensed, and directed this film because Iris’s story as a painter mirrors my own as a filmmaker. Using techniques core to my style–handheld camera, no dialogue, and themes of magic surrealism–I created a survival film about an artist finding her voice.
Like Iris, the desert taught me invaluable lessons about patience, adaptability, and the necessity of letting go. En Plein Air is about creative surrender, and that true freedom lies in embracing the unpredictable beauty of the process itself.
Festivals / Press
2025 Telefilm Canada “Not Short On Talent” (NSOT) Program (Cannes, France)
Though the film has yet to premiere worldwide, in May of 2025, the film took part in the NSOT program at the Marché du Film at Cannes, where filmmakers are invited to participate in programming designed to strengthen their ability to pitch their film, and expand their international network.
More information about the line-up.
Panavision New Filmmaker Grant (Los Angeles, United States)
This grant program has only a 3% acceptance rate, where Panavision gives gear in-kind to a team that has submitted an outstanding proposal in the field of visual storytelling. This grant allowed our production to use large format camera bodies like the DXL2, and vintage lensing like the Flare Lens and Petval Lens.
Cast & Crew
| Morgana Merlyn McKenzie | Director | Wild, Atlas World, Black River, Ellie |
| Morgana Merlyn McKenzie | Writer | Wild, Atlas World, Black River, Ellie |
| Ian Anthony Taylor | Writer | |
| Morgana Merlyn McKenzie | Producer | Wild, Atlas World |
| Max Retik | Producer | Wild, Black River |
| Lee Marshall | Producer | Her Body, Cì, Face, Bleed with Me |
| Lee Lawson | Key Cast | Station Eleven, So Much Tenderness, Richard and Mary |
| Morgana Merlyn McKenzie | Cinematographer | Wild, Black River, Her Body, Cì, Atlas World |
| Evan Jerred | Sound: Dialogue Edit and Mix | Sharp Objects, Little Bird, The Morning Show, It's What Each Person Needs |
| Stefana Fratila | Sound: Sound Design | Priscilla, Swan Song, It's What Each Person Needs, Between Realities, Along the Edge of Time |
| Anna Catley | Editor | Paying for It, We Forgot To Break Up, Thriving: A Dissociated Reverie |
Lee Lawson (Lead actress, “Iris”)
Lee Lawson is a neurodiverse, performer and filmmaker whose work explores embodied storytelling.
Lee has appeared in work programmed at TIFF, Fantasia, Fotographia, Fest, KIFF, St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival, on HBO, at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Lee was recently invited to Cannes 2025 through Telefilm’s Not Short on Talent Program for her work in Morgana McKenzie’s, En Plein Air.
Her directorial credits include Richard and Mary, a tactile short featured on CBC Radio’s Here and Now, and Man Eating Pussy, a feminist body horror supported by CCA, OAC, PANAVISION, and the NFB.
She is currently in production for Polycepolis, a movement-based exploration of neurodivergence and coupledom, supported by OAC and CCA. Upcoming projects include Self Portrait: Skin, bone, Subdermis, a fixed-frame documentary about the DIY plastic surgery community, and Unicorn, her debut feature—a metaphysical comedy about surviving childhood cancer.
Lee Marshall (Producer)
Lee Marshall is a filmmaker and third-culture Canadian who grew up in the Philippines, Nepal and Pakistan. Her first feature film, psychological horror BLEED WITH ME (2021), which she produced and starred in, was acquired by AMC’s SHUDDER. In 2023, Lee launched Returning Productions Inc. to develop her slate of female-driven genre film and television, including the one-hour horror comedy series PARTY GIRL #3 (TIFF Series Accelerator 2024, Inside Out Financing Forum 2024), supernatural horror HEARING THINGS (Frontières Market 2021, Telefilm Development Program 2021), psychological horror DRIP, and half-hour supernatural drama CURSE WORDS (Independent Production Fund/Canada Media Fund Short Form Series Development Program 2023).
Her produced work has screened at TIFF, Fantasia, CIFF, AIFF, Whistler, and FNC and has been selected for Telefilm’s Not Short on Talent at Cannes 2025 and SODEC’s Quebec En Courts at Clermont-Ferrand 2021. Lee is a proud alum of the 2023 Norman Jewison Film Program.
When she’s not writing or producing under her own company, she is supervising producer at the Canadian Film Centre where she oversees development and physical production for 23 original projects a year.
Anna Catley (Editor)
With Anna Catley’s lifelong obsession with cinema, she brings a deep wealth of knowledge about film across genres and time periods, which informs her unique creative eye in the edit process.
With roots as a Youtube film essayist, Anna’s editing credits have expanded to include the upcoming feature film Paying For It (dir. Sook-Yin Lee), We Forgot to Break Up (dir. Karen Knox), the award-winning web series Avocado Toast, and the short film Thriving: A Dissociated Reverie, which premiered at Sundance in 2023. In addition to her narrative work, she has cut music videos/musical performances for artists like H.E.R, Alessia Cara, The Tragically Hip, Mother Mother + more. She has been nominated for two CSAs (Canadian Screen Awards) and three CCE (Canadian Cinema Editors) awards. She is also an alumni of the Berlinale Talents.
Anna is Toronto-based and holds a degree in film studies from Queen’s University. She is also an alumna of the Editor’s Lab at the Canadian Film Centre, which is Canada’s leading incubator for the next generation of creative professionals and industry leaders.
Anna enjoys tarot cards, strong coffee, and the mellow madness of a Werner Herzog voiceover. Preferably all at once.
Stefana Fratila (Sound Design)
Stefana Fratila is a Romanian-born artist, composer and sound designer based in Toronto, Canada. She is also a DJ and co-founder of Crip Rave, an event platform showcasing and prioritizing Crip, Disabled, Deaf, Mad, and Sick body-minds within safer and more accessible rave spaces. She created Sononaut, 8 open-source VST plug-ins that emulate the atmospheric conditions of the planets in our solar system in collaboration with NASA scientists and Jen Kutler.
She has exhibited and performed her work internationally, including at MoMA and e-flux (New York, USA), Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), MUTEK (Montréal) / MUTEK.AE (Dubai), and the International Symposium on Electronic Art (Paris, France). She has also completed residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Wave Farm Transmission Arts, SAT (Société des arts technologiques), and CMMAS (Mexican Centre for Music and Sonic Arts). She was a winner of the Canadian Screen Award for Best Sound Editing (2022), Best Sound Design in a Feature Length Documentary (2024), and the Director’s Guild of Canada Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing (2023). Her film scores have screened at Le Centre Pompidou, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma Montréal, Leeds International Film Festival, and The Viennale. She is also an alumni of Berlinale Talents.
Resident Advisor called her most recent album, I want to leave this Earth behind, “a spellbinding LP of sound art that delights and unnerves in equal measure” while Bandcamp Daily highlighted it as “41 minutes of space travel that perfectly capture the immense possibilities of sound.” She has opened for artists like Mary Lattimore, Claire Rousay, Lucretia Dalt, and Julianna Barwick. Under her alias DJ Crip Time, she has appeared on NTS Radio (London), Rinse France (Paris), The Lot (New York), Refuge Worldwide (Berlin), Radio Nopal (CDMX), HKCR (Hong Kong), n10.as (Montréal), SutroFM (San Francisco), and Hotel Radio Parisf
