After his delirious, vividly strange debut The Wild Boys, Bertrand Mandico is back with After Blue (Dirty Paradise), which premiered at Locarno Film Festival last year and will now arrive in U.S. theaters starting June 3. Set in a faraway future, on a wild and untamed female inhabited planet called After Blue, the queer sci-fi fantasy romance follows a lonely teenager named Roxy who unknowingly releases a mystical, dangerous, and sensual assassin from her prison. Roxy and her mother Zora (Elina Löwensohn) are held accountable, banished from their community, and forced to track the murderer named Kate Bush down. Haunted by the spirits of her murdered friends, Roxy starts a long journey pacing the supernatural territories of this filthy paradise. Ahead of the release, the new U.S. trailer has now arrived.
Leonardo Goi said in his review, “In the post-apocalyptic nightmare of After Blue, humanity—or what’s left of it—roams a former paradise turned wasteland. The Armageddon that wrecked the Earth in some undetermined past left no machines behind, no screens, and, perhaps most conspicuously, no men. In the distant planet the human race fled to, and which writer-director Bertrand Mandico’s film is named after, “they were the first to die,” we’re warned early on: “their hairs grew inside them, and killed them.” As it was for its predecessor, The Wild Boys, After Blue is suffused in a feverish ecstasy, that wild excitement that comes from a watching one world crumble and another jutting into being from scratch, a vision of a clean slate in which everything—and everyone—can be reinvented, and every norm challenged. “
See the new trailer below.
After Blue (Dirty Paradise) opens on June 3. See theatrical dates here.