A Photographic Memory
Winner of the Truer Than Fiction Award at the 2025 Film Independent Spirit Awards and a New York Times Critic’s Pick, A Photographic Memory is an intimate, genre-bending portrait of the filmmaker’s trailblazing mother, Sheila Turner Seed – a vibrant and pioneering journalist, photographer, and filmmaker, who died suddenly and tragically when Rachel was just 18 months old. Uncovering the vast archive Turner Seed produced, including lost interviews with iconic photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bruce Davidson, Cecil Beaton, Lisette Model, and Gordon Parks, and others, Rachel attempts to build a posthumous relationship with her mother through her interviews, photographs, journals, films, and the stories of those who remember her. The result is an unlikely mother-daughter conversation that evades time and space, exploring universal themes of memory, loss, and legacy.
A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY is a Zeitgeist Films release in association with Kino Lorber and will open in Summer 2025 (see playdates below). To book this film please contact Nancy Gerstman or Emily Russo.
A press kit, trailer, stills, jpegs of the poster and social media assets will be available to download from our Exhibition DropBox. (Please note: when you click on any item to download you can ignore the login request and click on "Continue to download only.")
Rachel Elizabeth Seed
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 Pictures, 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 including SACRED by Academy-Award-winning filmmaker Thomas Lennon. Rachel is co-founder and executive director of the Brooklyn Documentary Club, a thriving NYC film collective with more than 300 members.
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