This years film release Teddy Bears Live Forever takes its cues from Ian Curtis' vast catalogue of bleak but beautiful lyrics. Songs such as She's Lost Control, Atrocity Exhibition and The Eternal are some of the few that filmmaker Fabrizio Federico has named as the films inspiration, ''Ian's lyrics are like mini movies, they paint such simple doom laden pictures that I found them ideal to form the main characters spiritual DNA, Ian is her divine guide.
The fact that Ian also believed in reincarnation also touched a nerve with the director, ''before I made the movie I was hypnotised in a past regressive therapy session and I travelled far and wide back in time just like Ian sang about in Wilderness, during the session I found myself on a farm covered in blood surrounded by a dead family and all their slaughtered livestock, it was terrifying and that vision has haunted me ever since.''
April is a young faded ''It girl'' suffering in exile from multiple-personality disorder (brought on by a UFO Cult & Hollywood) and she decides that one of her six personalities must lose her virginity.
As April suffers bizarre flashbacks in a solitary room, sleepwalking, telephoning rent boys, listening to The Carpenters and terrorising her old guardian with her untamed sex appeal. She ultimately set's out to become a modern saint.
''I made the film on intuition and a sensation to focus on some powerful messages (trauma, anti-establishment, false idolatry, existential angst and spirituality) wrapped up in an isolated feline martyr quality.
The main character April is fighting to regain a state of grace that she lost as an ''It girl'' living in a superficial society obsessed with illusion while working in Hollywood. April is trying to penetrate the essence of her problems by being brave, screaming & articulating her pain through the film. She's trying to release the poisoned fragrance of her trauma. She's deprogramming her self by losing her mind.
In the beginning of the movie we're shown a glimpse into her former ''It girl'' pop-culture life, at the complete absolute zenith of her fame, which is full of tacky excitement, flashes, games, disciples, vibrations and action.
But then the film moves to the aftermath of all that, and to her current isolated life in London after rejecting her followers. But now she is battling her six personalities, so in a way she's leading six different realities and levels of consciousness. Each personality is a different level of consciousness, but music is her true prayer. She listens to The Carpenters while in exile, because she identifies with women who suffered, like Karen Carpenter, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe etc... but she also enjoys hanging herself by visualising her suicide.
The film is also an insight into gurus, and how they deal with their followers problems, whether they are suffering from family or social suffering. The movies about spiritual terms instead of adolescent terms.
So while she's living out Hollywood, April get's mixed up with this UFO cult, has an outer body experience and is raped by the cult. After this trauma and because she's already mixed-up with this narcissism of her glamour lifestyle, it finally turns her into a stretcher case. In the film we watch her fighting to win back her sanity.
She constructs this mission to cure the most evil of her multiple-personalities, to lose her virginity and to feel touch, which gives her a fresh enthusiasm and a existential mission; the glorification to start communicating again. In general terms, she is coming out of a isolated fog and is looking for a universal consciousness. This girls story actually represents the whole elemental goal of humanity.
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| Filmmaker Fabrizio Federico in Macclesfield |
Touch is the sparkling combination of feeling all of your senses all at once. So she decides to recapture her salvation by losing the virginity of the most evil, of all her multiple personalities, called Sam.
Sam is a mythological anti-hero personality, a complete freak who suck's on her bloody tampons, wears wigs and sexually terrorises her old guardian that she's living with. But in many ways April is sacrificing her sanity in order to purify her soul from Sam's sinister presence. In order to become a divine being again and to grow.