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by Sarah Jacobson

On my way to Finland I got totally sick, so I only saw a few films, but one of them was a total revelation. Fistful of Flies is the girl film I've been waiting for my whole life. I was a big fan of director Monica Pellizzari's short film Just Desserts which explored themes between a young girl's sexuality and food. Monica comes from an Italian family but she grew up in Australia, a theme that runs through most of her work. Fistful of Flies is a story about a young girl, Mars, who can't stop masturbating. Her dad tries different brutal ways to stop her as her mother weakly goes along. But Mars remains rebellious and stubborn, eventually confronting her father and making the family change for the better. That absolutely amazed me, you never daughters as people in films, usually they are lame plot device. Mars' strength reminded me a little bit of Dawn Wiener in Welcome to the Dollhouse where no matter what happened to her, she didn't back down at all. The masturbation scenes are totally sexy and Mars is a force to be reckoned with, wearing tampons as earrings in defiance of being set up with the town's other Italian boy. Watching Mars go from confused school girl to a powerful young woman was totally liberating. But thing that really made me fall in love with this film is that it was funny as much as it was true, and it had the same kind of bizarreness that characterizes Jane Campion's early work (Campion and Pellizzari are friends). The film is very striking visually, the camerawork and the colors add another great level of emotional punch.

I know that Fistful of Flies is having a hard time getting distribution in America, even though it's winning prizes at festivals all over the world and did really well at Sundance this year. I think because the film is such a powerful, complex film about a girl, distributors don't know what to do with it. But if you EVER have a chance to check it out, do it and let's hope that Fistful of Flies has a chance to fuck shit up in the U.S.

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