SAN DIEGO ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL - PROGRAMING STAFF

SDAFF CATALOG DESCRIPTIONS

MARY IS HAPPY, MARY IS HAPPY follows the adventures of high school student Mary and her best friend Suri. They propose a yearbook project to chronicle the school’s most memorable memories, but a series of escapades leaves them questioning which memories are worth remembering.

“Fuck it. Let’s just remember us.” Or so Mary tweets. Inspired by the whimsy of teenagers online, director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit (36, SDAFF ’13) adapts MARY IS HAPPY from 410 consecutive tweets of a real-life teen named Mary Molony (@marymalony). The tweets appear onscreen before action that illustrates, confounds, or expands the original 140-character message.

The form breathlessly captures Mary’s cryptic approach to life, in which we never quite know how to process the balance between how she acts and how she thinks. In its own witty way, Mary’s online voice channels her pre-adulthood hopes, fears, and confusions: thinking about life after high school, moving away to college, saying goodbye to friends, falling in love for the first time. The juxtaposition of the Twitter stream and her actions is an utterly unique stream-of-dual-consciousnesses flurry of teenage awkwardness and intimate humor that keeps us on our toes, waiting for the next tweet to reveal itself. –Rizzhel Javier

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