Producer: Natasha Alexa Garcia, Brooks Branch
Director: Floria Sigismondi
Screenplay: Lillian Berlin
Cinematography: Nicola Pecorini
Film Editing: Holle Singer
Art Direction: David King
Music: Devin Sarno, The Watson Twins, Nels Cline, Jadyn Norris Sarno
Cast: Nick Fowler (main boy), Mirjam Kositchek (mother), Holle Singer (Teacher's voice).
C-11m.
Floria Sigismondi
Floria Sigismondi's work encompasses film, video, photography and installations. Incorporating early film and painterly aesthetics, she creates a hyper-surrealism based on the figure, using images derived from hallucinatory dream-states. Her videos mix seamlessly with her photography series, and her photographic images translate naturally into mixed-media forms. Sigismondi's images exist in a theatre setting that is both narrative and starkly visual, revealing the poetic and sometimes macabre world.
She explores the effects of science on our contemporary experience of the body and describes an undefined possibility for the future; with our current advances in biotechnology, it poses a possibility that is frightening, complex, mysterious and compelling.
Sigismondi started her career as a fashion photographer. She ventured into music videos when she was approached by the production company The Revolver Film Co. to direct for a number of Canadian bands.
Her very innovative, but also very disturbing, video works, located in sceneries she once described as "entropic underworlds inhabited by tortured souls and omnipotent beings," attracted a number of prominent musicians. Sigismondi has worked with The White Stripes, David Bowie, The Cure, Leonard Cohen, Sigur Ros, Marilyn Monroe and Bjork, among others.
Her trademark dilating, jittery camerawork, noticeable as early as her video for Manson's "The Beautiful People," has been replicated by a great number of directors. Sigismondi has exhibited her photography, film and sculpture installations in exhibitions internationally in New York, Paris, Toronto, Rome, Los Angeles, Mexico City, London, Italy, Germany, Sweden and Copenhagen. Her photographs have been included in group exhibitions with Cindy Sherman, Rebecca Horn, Vanessa Beecroft, Tony Oursler, Donald Kipski, Francesco Clemente and Joel-Peter Witkin. The German art press Die Gestalten Verlag has published two monographs of her photography, Redemption (1999) and Immune (2005).
Sigismondi was born in Pescara, Italy, to opera-singer parents. The family immigrated to the industrial city of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, when she was 2.
