MO-FREEK is a name taken from an unused character in an early Spike Lee book — adopted with Lee's permission in 1994 and carried ever since as Ford's creative alter-ego and lifelong playground.

The roots are in New York City in the mid-1990s — the East Village as it was then, when arthouse theaters, underground art shows, and video installations were part of the same continuous conversation. The Anthology Film Archives was part of that world: Brakhage's hand-painted frames, Mekas's diary films, work that treated the camera as a private instrument rather than a public one. MO-FREEK is where that sensibility lives. It's the part of the practice that answers to no one.

What you'll find here spans 1994 to the present — full-length experimental features, road films, collages, and solo video work made while traveling, self-financed and shot on the streets. Some were made with longtime collaborators Ellar Coltrane, Lucky McKee, Angela Bettis, and Eddie Steeples. All of it fully outside the industry.

EXPERIMENTAL | FEATURES | DOCS

EVERYTHING IS STOLEN

Experimental | Producer, Director, DP, Editor | 2024 | 75min | IM DB

Poet and actor Ellar Coltrane (Boyhood) gave Ford a handful of poems, and Ford turned them into something genuinely strange and beautiful. Everything Is Stolen is part personal essay, part collage, part meditation on what it means to shed an old self and step into a new one. It’s about mental health, identity, and the terrifying freedom of reinvention. Best Documentary, International Avant-Garde Cinema Awards, 2024.

DROWNED

Ellar Coltrane and Rasha Mosa spend one day together in downtown Los Angeles before his life breaks apart and reassembles somewhere else. Drowned is unhurried and achingly specific — a love letter to a city and to that particular kind of connection you can only have when you know it’s temporary.

BY THE RIVER

Produced by Adrien Brody. Ford sent Ellar Coltrane on a cross-country train ride with a recorder and an open itinerary — gathering sounds, recording conversations about life, creativity, and what comes next. A film about listening. Premiered at Sidewalk Film Festival, 2016, and featured at the Austin Film Society. Filmmaker Richard Linklater called By The River “a brave and sincere attempt at communication.”

LEGS

Eddie Steeples plays a cult rocker on the run. Angela Bettis is his fiercely loyal assistant. The world is after him and he doesn’t fully understand why. Part noir, part character study, with a sense of humor about its own darkness. Premiered in São Paulo Film Series, 2014.

WHEN IS TOMORROW

Narrative | Writer, Director, DP, Editor | 2008 | 83min | IM DB

Eddie Steeples as a New York poet who shows up to his old friend’s wedding and finds something considerably messier than a celebration. Special appearances by Angela Bettis and C. Robert Cargill. This is early Ford — raw, funny, already fully himself. Premiered at the Boston Underground Film Festival. Played the Alamo Drafthouse and was featured at Austin Film Society.

THEORY OF BANYAN

Documentary | Director, DP, Editor | 2004 | 44min | YOUTUBE

From 1998 - 2003 Kevin Ford teamed up with Stephen Perkins of Jane’s Addiction to capture the recording process and live shows of Stephen’s experimental music project Banyan, featuring legendary musicians Mike Watt, Nels Cline, John Frusciante, and many more. This self-financed collaboration between Ford and Perkins was born out of their work together on the 1997 Jane’s Addiction film Three Days, which Ford co-directed.

LAST DAYS OF AMERICA

Angela Bettis is a young woman who has left society and is now embarked on an inward journey of silence into herself. Her past life in New York loops in her mind. As she pieces together her life in the serenity of nature, an unlikely teenage companion (Tyffin Cvejanovich) and a rambling stranger (C. Robert Cargill) show up and are the only people willing to accept her for the blank slate that she is trying to become.

PEOPLE ARE DEAD

A body-snatcher (Mia Tyler) is gathering dead bodies off the streets and no one seems to know why, especially the two detectives (Eddie Steeples, Pat McNolte) who are assigned to find her. Across town, a semi-depressed Broadway actress (Angela Bettis) has a reunion with her old friend (Tasha Guevara) and there is tension about the distance between them. Angela's boyfriend (Kevin Ford) seeks the counsel of his paranoid best friend (Cinqué Lee) to try to find advice about life. The film premiered at the Boston Underground Film Festival in 2003.

CARAVAN SUMMER

Experimental | Director, DP, Editor | 2000 | 83min | YOUTUBE

In the Summer of 1999 a group of misfit artists joined together, hopping on an old school bus and fleeing New York City to start a new life in Oregon. What they found along their cross-country adventure made them question whether they ever should have left in the first place. Featuring Eddie Steeples, Lucky McKee, Don Piper, Peter Salett, Jake Guenther, and many more, Caravan Summer is a truly experimental late 90s film by Monica Deo & Kevin Ford.

VIDEO INSTALLATION

In 2019 Kevin Ford create this triptych video installation, Manufacturing Fast Food Nation, for a Richard Linklater retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France. The footage all came from a behind-the-scenes documentary that Ford shot during filming of Linklater’s movie in 2005.