A film by Gregg Araki
USA 1993, 79 min
In fifteen disjointed episodes, Totally Fucked Up dives headfirst into the lives of a group of queer, disaffected Los Angeles teens who form a surrogate family of sorts as they grapple with desire and heartbreak, societal and familial rejection, and the alienation that comes with growing up gay in an era of relentless moralising. Araki’s answer to the teen comedies of the 1980s is both a defiant anthem to being an outsider and an angry reckoning with the pervasiveness of homophobia in America. The film captures adolescent angst with an immediacy that still hurts.
Director, screenplay, cinematographer & editor: Gregg Araki – with songs by: Ministry, Red House Painters, The Jesus & Mary Chain, This Mortal Coil and others – With James Duval, Roko Belic, Susan Behshid, Jenee Gill, Gilbert Luna and others. – German distribution: Camera Obscura Filmdistribution, cameraobscurafilms.de
Gregg Araki
Gregg Araki was born in Los Angeles in 1959 to Japanese-American parents. In the early 1980s, Araki enrolled at USC Film School, where his student projects were inspired by new wave music, DIY underground art culture, and filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jim Jarmusch, and John Waters. Since his cinematic breakthrough with The Living End at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, Araki has been at the forefront of the New Queer Cinema movement alongside Isaac Julien and Todd Haynes. Araki’s three subsequent feature films, which form his highly influential Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, inspired an entire generation of outcasts and queer people to accept themselves and give the middle finger to anyone who dared to judge them.
