DISCO BOY: The Vermont Premiere

Disco Boy (90 mins, 2023, Dir. Giacomo Abbruzzese, In Ibo, French, English & Polish with English subtitles).

Aleksei (Franz Rogowski) is an undocumented Belarusian immigrant on the run from a past he must bury. In a form of Faustian pact, he becomes a member of the French Foreign Legion in exchange for the promise of French citizenship and a new life. Far away, in the Niger Delta, Jomo (Morr Ndiaye) is leading a rebel group fighting the devastating foreign exploitation of the area’s oil-rich land. When Jomo’s group takes executives of a French oil company hostage, their destinies intertwine. A neon-dream parable of exploitation and the possibility of transcendence, director Giacomo Abbruzzese investigates contemporary globalist Europe—the intertwined consequences of capitalism, militarism, and immigration—while also creating an interior portrait of the emotional fallout from violence and guilt. The entrancing cinematography by Hélène Louvart won a 2023 Winner Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution. Epsilon Spires is the only venue in Vermont to screen this exceptional cinematic experience.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM:

"Bold, creative and unflinching, DISCO BOY is alive with unpredictable political energy." - Alliance of Women Film Journalists 

"A visually thrilling, ambitious and distinctly freaky adventure into the heart of imperial darkness. The electronic score by Vitalic (AKA Pascal Arbez-Nicolas) throbs in its own incantatory trance and Hélène Louvart’s cinematography is a thing of beauty. It’s quite a trip."- Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“Bold, visceral, phantasmagorical…Franz Rogowski is haunted, intense and typically brilliant.” – Carmen Gray, Sight & Sound

"A neon-dream parable cast against the shadow of sweeping global forces…a lean but sweepingly ambitious film crafted with formal rigor. Abbruzzese deftly transitions between haunting silence and kinetic energy, a balance supported in particular by Vitalic’s pulsating score and the inspired compositions of the cinematographer Hélène Louvart. Rogowski pulls it all together with stoic features that emanate so much sorrow and history.” – Brandon Yu, The New York Times

"A trippy flex of the imagination that creates indelible images and strange new connections in the brain. To illustrate its strangeness, Disco Boy could be loosely described as a mash-up of Beau Travail and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, two very different movies. While both are firmly anchored in arthouse history, neither resembles the other, and it’s that contrast—the rich potential opened up by the space in between—that’s in play here." -Deadline