Broken Feet, Paganism, and Ninjas:

(An interview with Fabrizio Federico)

It’s the tail end of 2012, on a hot New York minute day just a week away before the premiere of his feature-length directorial debut, Black Biscuit, at the iconic bohemian Raindance film festival. And Fabrizio Federico is climbing a tree desperately trying to recapture his camcorder attached to a stray cat's head. As a drowsy Marilyn Monroe lookalike watches the action move higher and higher up the tree,while skaters glide around, unfolding before their eyes this is a typical day of the way Fabrizio impulsively and irresponsibly goes about filming a movie. Leading us into the side streets investigating the subterranean underbelly of our society. That’s when he slips and falls. ‘’I was going through a period of wanting to do as much as possible in a short space of time’’ says Fabrizio Federico, staring blankly at River Phoenix as he shakes and laughs himself to sleep on the dirty sidewalk floor in the doomed My Own Private Idaho. ‘’Everything was going really fast, I was out of control, wanting to make movies based on any random stranger that I met, just wanting to capture all these street corner allegories that I wanted people to experience’’. ‘’I’d put Black Biscuit together, and was in the middle of finishing my next movie called The Milk Man, that was inspired by The Torture Garder ‘’, Octave Mirbeau’s book about the hypocracy of civilazation. ‘’The film was about a milk man who deals drugs to children. The only problem was that one of the mothers in the film, her neighbour found out about the storyline and allerted the local council and the CRI and it just escalated from there. Then I broke my foot which stopped everything for a while. I just had a change of mind and felt an omen. I ended up having a bath with the harddrive that the films master was on. I started to feel prison bound being in the house on crutches all the time, which made me want to capture the feeling of being frozen’’.

Becoming more and more interested in the macabre after the injury, awful things started to become funny by way of communicating via socian networks for the first time. ‘’Id always shunned Facebook and Twitter, didn’t even understand how big it had become, but I started to realize how some people’ whole world is based on the computer, it rubbed off on me and I had an epiphany of dark rooms, with zombies tied to their computer mouses’’. At one time being confined to the great indoors was an impossible way of life for Fabrizio. After spending his early life living in England and narrowly escaping a house fire at age five. ‘’I was watching early Japanese Godzilla films and he was burning the city own, it looked like fun to me.’’ That’s when he landed in the rural southern Italy town of Massa. Free to ride Vespas and explore the local mountains, hunting knives, baseball and ex president masks became a big fascination to the adolescent. ‘’I used to organize World War II games such as the atomic bombing of ant nests, and we used to hunt and skin lizards. It was deadly fun, I had the freedom to do what ever I wanted, it was like Lord of the Flies.’’ An early screening of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo caught the imagination of a young intellectual mind focusing on what was rotting on the vines of history. ‘’I thought it was the news or armagedon being televised, I didn’t realize it was a movie. But I couldn’t turn way, my mother walked in on me watching it and freaked. But I couldn’t go back to watching E.T or 90210. An epileptic deep winter mood came and Twin Peaks and that theme song was everywhere. Then I saw Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie and I started enjoying this culture tht I never knew about.’’

The first thing now was learning how to walk again and with that experiencing the kidness that people still do carry deep down. ‘’I ended up having to get used to going outside again, I’d never experienced how it felt to be an invalid, which is what I felt like. I became very inward looking like the kid in American Beauty who films plastic bags floating around. I felt like a different person as if I’d shed a skin. The Pregnant sarted to come out.’’ Receiving no visual clues of what this new direction will look like, it seemed like the social butterfly period had ended. Federico raising an eyebrow, adds, ‘’I wanted to experience the aftermath of a platic party, the housekeeper has quit so now ‘’you’’ have to sweep up the paranoia.’’ After a period of screening Black Biscuit at local Universities, who would balk after discovering the ideals of the Pink8 Manifesto, i.e., ‘Film school is Poison’ and being banned from being screened in State Hospitals, Private Mental Istitutions, and Homeless helters. Black Biscuit faced censorship on Youtube after a period of cat and mouse guerrilla screenings. ‘’I didn’t realize or wanted to believe how closed minded, some people are, not in this century, I still find t hard to believe, what is everyone so scared of ?’’