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Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair – Year 5
Thu Jun 04

Mysterious Skin

Q&A with filmmaker Gregg Araki New 4K Restoration by the Academy Film Archive and UCLA Film & Television Archive in conjunction with Sundance Institute
YEAR
2004
ACCESSIBILITY
HI
FORMAT
DCP
RUNTIME
1h 45m
DIRECTOR
Gregg Araki
CAST
Brady Corbet, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Elisabeth Shue

SYNOPSIS

Q&A with filmmaker Gregg Araki

New 4K Restoration by the Academy Film Archive and UCLA Film & Television Archive in conjunction with Sundance Institute

‘Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair – Year 5’

Two young men are haunted by similar events from their past, though the effects manifest themselves in very different ways, in this powerful drama from independent filmmaker Gregg Araki. In the summer of 1981, Brian (George Webster) and Neil (Chase Ellison) are both eight years old and playing on the same little league baseball team in a small Kansas town. One day, after a game, Brian blacks out after getting caught in a rainstorm, and five hours later he finds himself sitting in his basement with his nose bleeding and no memory of what happened to him. Over the years, the event — particularly the missing five hours — weigh heavily on his mind, and he becomes convinced that he was kidnapped by space aliens. Teenaged Brian (now played by Brady Corbet) becomes friends with Avalyn Friesen (Mary Lynn Rajskub), a woman who claims to have been abducted by aliens on several occasions, and she urges him to look to his dreams for patterns that might suggest what happened to him. One day, Neil is contacted by Brian, who after seeing one of their team photos from their days in little league suspects he might have some clues as to what happened to him in 1981.



ABOUT THE RESTORATION:
Digitally restored by the Academy Film Archive and UCLA Film & Television Archive in conjunction with Sundance Institute in 4K from the original 35 mm A/B camera negatives and original sound elements. The restoration was supervised by Gregg Araki at Resillion and Monkeyland Audio. The restoration was funded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, mk2, Frameline, Sundance Institute and UCLA Film & Television Archive, with additional funding and services by Antidote Films and Strand Releasing.

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