MAMA'S BOY
11:18 BLOCK 13 LOCAL HEROES
Horror (USA) 2018
Writer / Director: Samantha Kolesnik
Lehigh Valley Premiere
SYNOPSIS: A young man's life spirals into depravity and madness when he confronts the trauma of his childhood.
DIRECTOR BIO: Samantha Kolesnik is a writer and filmmaker living in Pennsylvania. She writes, directs and produces at her company, Above the Line Artistry. Samantha is one of the co-founders and directors of the Women in Horror Film Festival, a festival showcasing women creatives in genre filmmaking. Recent films she's worked on, Rainy Season and I Baked Him a Cake, have won awards on the festival circuit. Samantha's prose has been published in nationally regarded literary magazines and in 2015, she founded the literary magazine, Five on the Fifth, for which she served as editor-in-chief for its inaugural year and still serves as a reader. Her screenplays have garnered attention at film festivals internationally. Samantha is a strong advocate for community through art and believes that people can come together, through creative expression, to enact positive social change.
DIRECTOR STATEMENT: Mama's Boy asks, "In a society where the maternal bond is of the highest regard, how can a person love himself, and how will anyone ever love him, if his own mother did not?" Mama's Boy is the psychological and symbolic exploration of what it feels like to carry maternal trauma with you. What is it like to live in a culture where people say (and believe) that no one will love you as much as your mother does, and yet you know that your mother doesn't love you at all? The film is about loneliness, isolation, and the desperate desire for love. Joshua (Malcolm Mills) finds he is only able to have human relationships in which he debases himself, recreating the pain and sexual abuse of his childhood. He has been imprinted from youth with the idea that he is an object, only valuable for his use to others. The world is full of conditions for him, and the idea of mutually reciprocal love or friendship is as real to him as a fairy tale. He tries to recreate the traumatic bond to change it and ultimately, in anger, he tries to 'kill' it. As bleak as it is, and as much as society would like to turn its rose-colored eye, some are born into hands which would crush them, if only to give those hands a fleeting moment of pleasure.