Out of the parentheses.
Pictorial Pictures makes room for the stories the industry mentions in passing — and then moves on from.
Independent horror rewrote the rules. Small budgets, singular voices, fearless marketing — and films that became cultural events, not footnotes. Audiences showed up in theaters, critics paid attention, and careers were made overnight.
We believe the intimate drama can do the same. The queer coming-of-age story, the small-town elegy, the late-in-life reinvention — these deserve the conviction, craft, and theatrical ambition that genre film gets by default.
So Pictorial Pictures backs under-represented stories and the writers who carry them. We develop with care, produce with discipline, and release with the confidence that a quiet film can still be an event.
David Lykes Keenan.
A Michigan Yankee who made Austin home in 1978, David Lykes Keenan is deep into his third act. He rode the city's tech boom and built a software company in 1986 — sold in 2020 — then spent a decade as a respected street photographer before committing fully to cinema.
His Kickstarter-funded monograph FAIR WITNESS (2014), endorsed by Elliott Erwitt and Mary Ellen Mark, defined his visual philosophy: a witness who finally stepped into the frame. His short Bodies of Water (2018), starring Ellar Coltrane of Boyhood, screened at more than twenty festivals worldwide.
With the Tiny, Texas feature completed and Learning to Swim in development, Pictorial Pictures is the vehicle for that third act — and for the writers and stories he intends to bring with him.