A comedy-drama set in the melting hot suburbs of Australia in the mid-1990s. Rhys is a neurotic teenager with an over-active imagination and a bizarre dirty secret under his bed. He falls in love with Iris – the nastiest, coolest girl at school – who is a guitar goddess, has a pet tarantula, and is totally out of his league. His world gets even weirder when his parents separate and his mum decides to emigrate to the UK. Convinced his human rights are being attacked, Rhys makes a plea to the government for help, which only makes his mother tighten her clasp. He becomes increasingly alienated as he reinvents himself as a grunge rocker to impress Iris, stealing marijuana from his hippy dad to pay for guitar lessons. However, the only thing that comes naturally to Rhys is disaster and everything goes balls up. Running out of options, he hijacks his family’s demountable house and drives it into the desert. But even in the most vast, barren environment on the planet Rhys cannot outrun his mother.
Australia is an English town located three quarters of a mile from the surface of the Sun. It is inhabited almost exclusively by criminals and things designed by nature to kill you. But if you actually go there you will notice no one seems to mind they are living inside a Hieronymus Bosch painting; in fact they bloody love the place. Now imagine the horror if an Australian actually realised how bat-shit insane their environment was; it would probably be on par with how the typical teenager already feels about his family. Combine these sentiments and you are entering Rhys’ world. His story is an arduous journey into the paradoxes of being fifteen in the suburbs of paradise/hell. I am interested in exploring domestic upheaval and how it can result in a pull towards the absurd. It is specific to my own history and yet something widely experienced. When chaos comes into the home, the family turns on itself and the only way to survive is to rediscover each other on new, slightly damaged terms. Ultimately Rhys must accept being utterly lost, not as a weakness, but as a strange and unmistakable cause for optimism.
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