At the 40th Lovers Film Festival, FRED Film Radio interviewed the director Matthew Fifer to talk about “Haze”, a film presented in competition.

How did the “Haze” project come about and how much of a personal aspect is there in the story it tells? “I moved back home for the pandemic and I rediscovered my town’s abandoned psychiatric center. In New York, I grew up down the street from a massive psychiatric center that had 9,000 patients at its peak. It had its own movie theater, its own water supply, its own grocery store. It was a village and it was run by the psych patients. When I moved there, it was just this cemetery. These abandoned buildings that couldn’t be taken down because of asbestos, which is a cancer-causing. And so I said: ‘Wow, this would be a great set for a film’”, says Matthew Fifer. “And at the same time, my mother said: ‘Do you know that the man who built our house also built the psych center?’. He would steal supplies to build our house, like bricks and windows and doors. And he was an alcoholic. He also took psych patients to the house, to build it. My whole house is like almost an extension of the psychiatric center”.

Was “Haze” inspired by other films visually or narratively? “We’re having a conversation with the Hays Code, the law from Hollywood back in the 30s. And it said you cannot have queer people in your film unless they’re villains or they get murdered. You can’t have profanity. You can’t have nudity. And so all of these films like Psycho, Dressed to Kill, Silence of the Lambs have the Hays Code woven into the fabric of the story and the visual language, either intentionally or unintentionally”, says Matthew Fifer. “The movie is having a conversation with those films. And one of the last sequences is inspired by Silence of the Lambs”.

The queer community in cinema has often been represented in a way that is disconnected from reality and full of clichés. But something has changed. “I think we’ve come such a long way in the last five to ten years. Weekend was like the first film I remember seeing in the theater that was gay. And I was like ok walking into the theater and walking out and hiding myself”, remember Matthew Fifer. “And that one was so beautiful because it was kind of about the scarcity of queer love and how even if you find it for a moment, it’s beautiful, it’s everything. It’s what we all experience coming from the suburbs or rural parts. And when we finally get it, even for a moment, we’re like: ‘Oh my God, I have it’. And then it’s gone”.

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