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Birds of Neptune

Steven Richter
United States, 2015, 97 min.

In English.
Includes nudity, sexual content and adult language.

Young sisters Mona and Rachel are left to their own devices after the loss of their parents. Confined to their childhood home and constantly surrounded by nostalgia of the past, the girls have created their own pseudo-realities. Rachel finds solace in her music and old spiritual practices while her older sister Mona turns to unconventional and taboo forms of self-expression. When a man abruptly enters their world and starts to pull away at the fragile threads holding everything in place, the sisters find themselves facing harsh truths about their past. With a dark dream-like filmmaking style, BIRDS OF NEPTUNE encapsulates the enchanting mystery of the Pacific Northwest.

Director's Statement

Birds of Neptune is a tribute to the Pacific Northwest of the United States. I grew up here, studied here, had my first relationships here before moving to bigger cities and to other countries. For me, the PNW is a region that lays somewhere between the conscious and the unconscious: densely green, woodsy, with an almost constant grey that keeps us in a light mystic, druidic trance'it's a place of magic and mystery. I came back to the PNW principally to make this film'to search for the feelings surrounding those personal early mysteries, and their imagery. In Birds of Neptune, the sisters can't leave their house. They are trapped in the past, visually and emotionally, in a kind of nostalgia of an imagined past, a memory filtered by eyes too young to grasp what actually happened there.

Category: Drama.
Themes: Relationships, Sexuality, Women.