Sexual Dependency

2003 saw the scandal of the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, when underaged-looking models, eroticized as Madison Avenue marketing tools, crossed the line. The scenario was anticipated by Rodrigo Bellott's art installation in Bolivia in 2001, a billboard and website campaign touting a fictitious underwear brand with scantily-clad youth. Clothes companies eagerly inquired about manufacturing rights, so dead-on was the put-on. Bellott's billboards also appear in SEXUAL DEPENDENCY, a provocative portmanteau that set domestic box-office records despite its highly-experimental nature. The five-part feature is improvised by non-pro actors and based on interviews with hundreds of kids growing up confused, abused, tantalized, lusting and hurting in the modern era's oversexed milieu. Shooting digitally almost entirely in split-screen, Bellott gives us daring, dual angles of the same circumstances, granting us the intimacy his young-adult characters yearn for. (In Spanish with English subtitles)