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The Nest
Filmed in saturated colors on out-of-date film stocks with an aggressive soundtrack, the story of The Nest is told - The marriage of two young professionals unravels after an unnamed accident physically and emotional traumatizes the wife. Government agents, shadowy investigators and transgender beings appear, trying to solve the nervous-breakdown-mystery of secret alien forces that chose the couple as their target. In-camera tricks, drawings, derelict optical printing, miniatures, puppets and prosthetic makeup effects convey the dual collapse of the protagonists’ lives and the film structure as one unified entity.
2003, 16mm, 78min, color, sound mono
"As in many Jacques Rivette films, the whiff of some ever-present conspiracy hangs over 'The Nest.' But, naturally, viewers expecting anything resembling a tidy conclusion would do best to look elsewhere. Fotopoulos creeps around the edges of character and drama, conjuring moods of paranoia and dread that suggest the carefully ordered routines of daily life are a kind of opiate administered by sinister forces. Shooting in harsh 16mm color, Fotopoulos renders 'The Nest' in a typically Spartan, forbidding style that makes it seem as though he is some extraterrestrial visitor photographing humans for the first time, interrupted only by pockets of crude, stick-figure animation and intricately layered superimpositions. Fittingly, soundtrack eschews a conventional musical score in favor of industrial sounds that form their own kind of whirring, grating symphony."
- Scott Foundas, Variety
"The Nest plunges so deep into the oily miasma of its outdated color 16mm stock, cut to the arrhythmic melodies of Fotopoulos's brutal handiwork, that his genetic-terrorist creepshow makes Mullholland Drive - its nearest conceivable relative - feel like a glossy Disney cartoon by comparison."
- Ed Halter, The Village Voice
"The Nest's physiological and psychological are one and the same, perhaps making it his most nakedly emotional feature yet, and firmly positioning his narrative work in that slender alternate stream inhabited by filmmaker like Bresson, Warhol and Sokurov."
- Cinematexas
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