Q&A with director Santi Amodeo!

A 40-year-old junkie decides to follow a psychiatrist’s somewhat absurd list of dos and don’ts to the tee in order to kick his habit and become a “normal person”: be clean, be neat, eat right, clean your house, go shopping, socialize. But in doing so, he finds he has become a nobody, just another face in the crowd. When a 16-year-old girl comes into his life, like an astronaut who has fallen to Earth from out of nowhere, he suddenly gains the love, attention, and care that will rescue him from deadening conformity. Directly engaging taboos without prejudice or moralizing, Santi Amodeo constructs a story on and about the blurred lines of normalcy: in a society where we must adapt ourselves to a host of mores and norms, who is truly the Other, the oddball, the astronaut?

Screening with:

Holy Thriller
María Cañas, Spain, 2011, digital projection, 2m
Two nearly opposite cultural milestones, Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Seville’s Holy Week processions, are rolled together by tried-and-true iconoclast director María Cañas, a devourer of images, who simply yet relentlessly picks apart some of the myths and symbols on which Spain’s national identity is based.