Ed Halters essay about James Fotopoulos and his films:
"The films of James Fotopoulos examine heady esthetic and existential concerns through a unique hybrid of contemplative, delicate avant-garde formal effects and brutal low-budget body-horror, set within meticulously plotted structures that eschew typical experimental serendipity in favor of calculated auteurist rigor. At age 24, he’s completed 12 shorts and two features that play like the unlikely progeny of Stan Brakhage and Richard Kern, set in dingy urban environments that would make Ed Ulmer proud. Obsessed with the philosophical problems regarding sex, violence, extreme psychic states and unnerving atmospheres, as well as the classic formal issues of 16 mm lensing, Fotopoulos’ films wed a youthful fixation with the overpowering nature of primal drives to an uncommonly mature certitude of vision and technique." Read more.
Interview by Brian Frye here, James' website here.