Eddie Prunoske – 2023 Grand Prize Winner

Bottle Blondes

Al and Bea, an effeminate gay boy and heavyset Asian girl, are best friends and teenage pariahs. Their alliance is tested when their overlapping romantic pursuits turn dangerously deluded.

I was an effeminate gay kid in the late 90s/early aughts, coming of age at a time when queerness was far from the mainstream. Homophobic and racist antagonisms ran rampant in school hallways, and juvenile bullying was not yet a hot button concern. Fantasy and imagination became primary escape mechanisms during a claustrophobic childhood.

The emotional landscape of this film is inspired by that experience. Both ardent and irreverent, the film echoes the internal emotionality of an outsider adolescence by employing lavish fantasy, operatic stakes, and tunnel-vision obsession. It’s a technicolor portrait of pubescence in all its inelegance and contradiction: dark, humorous, complicated, suppressed, tender, horny, fun, isolating, fucked up, and overwrought.

The film is also a response to existing portrayals of queerness and queer adolescence in media. I feel these stories are often told through a heterosexual lens, muted for palatability, and interested in identifying shame as a definitive queer characteristic. Really, it’s the burden of societal shame that weighs marginal communities down. This is a story about self-possessed outsiders navigating their desires in a world that just isn’t built for them.

We all know what it’s like to feel lonely, isolated, misunderstood, craving for someone to really see us and connect. I hope there is a universality in the fabric of this film, that its humor and themes of alienation serve as a bridge across demographics.