Jennifer Reeder returns to She Makes Noise for the Spanish premiere of her new film. In the style of horror films and serial-killer episodes, the filmmaker continues to reflect on adolescence, the taboos associated with women’s bodies and the decadence of American society.
| Target audience: | General public |
| Location: | Sala Audiovisual |
| Duration: | 1 hour 40 minutes |
| Price: | 4€ |
On her 18th birthday, a troubled teenager acquires special powers that lead her to confront the killer who is making her high school classmates disappear.
Perpetrator, by Jennifer Reeder. USA. 2023. 100 min. Premiere in Spain.
Premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, the film is a new approach to the universe of high schools and teenage girls, through a postmodern vision of the horror-film genre, whose rules – from the opening credits to the subjective points of view and the use of the soundtrack – are questioned and even parodied.
The main character is Jonny Baptiste, a troubled young woman who lives with her ailing father and then moves in with her aunt, an enigmatic woman with Gothic overtones. At the new high school she starts to attend, several teenage girls begin to disappear. Meanwhile, Jonny undergoes a radical metamorphosis on her 18th birthday, acquiring powers that lead her to confront the perpetrator.
With an exuberant mise-en-scène and the director’s usual atmosphere of kitsch surrealism, Perpetrator reflects on how women who have stepped out of the norm have historically been labelled ‘crazy’. The filmmaker breaks taboos about the transformations that bodies undergo in adolescence and analyses the traumas in which American society, marked by systemic violence and superficiality, is immersed.
After its premiere in Berlin, Perpetrator has been selected for other prestigious international film festivals such as Karlovy Vary (Czech Republic), the Tribeca Film Festival (New York), the New Horizons International Film Festival (Poland) and Olhar de Cinema (Brazil).
Jennifer Reeder (USA, 1971) is a filmmaker and teacher trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has an extensive and prestigious film career, which has led her to premiere her works at the most important international festivals – Sundance, the Berlinale, Rotterdam, BFI London, Oberhausen, Ann Arbor or Vila do Conde – and in artistic contexts such as the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial or MoMA PS1.
She is an advisor to the Sundance Film Festival’s Indigenous Film Program and has received numerous awards and grants, including the USA Fellowship (2021), the Alpert Film Award residency at the MacDowell Colony, and the SFFILM/Rainin Grant.
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