Film Festival Dates
International Film Festival Rotterdam
Rotterdam, NetherlandsAll Screenings Are Over
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Tribeca Film Festival
New York City, NYAll Screenings Are Over
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Marfa Film Festival
Los Angeles, CASaturday, May 8th 6:45pm at the Crowley Theatre
Purchase Tickets Here ($60.00 USD)
Stuff To Buy
The Sentimental Engine Slayer
Written and Directed by Omar Rodriguez-Lopez
>> Visit Official SiteRelated Videos
The Plot
Barlam and Natalia are siblings, separated by what would seem to be only a few years. The family home, in a sprawling, yucca-studded 1950s-style subdivision on the far end of El Paso, is cluttered with Catholic ephemera and serves as the de facto crash pad for a host of chain-smoking, Guitar Hero-addicted deadbeats. Chief among them is Natalia's bedwetting other half, Zack, a slovenly gringo all too happy to take advantage of the lackadaisical lifestyle afforded by the girl's mysterious addiction and rent-free accommodations. Despite what seems to be something of a preoccupation with their parents' apparent divorce (at least on the part of Barlam), their mother is curiously absent. Barlam, when not on the receiving end of abuse at the hands of his grocery co-workers, spends his time cycling around the city, paying visits to his therapist father to quiz him on details of the ancient divorce (not to mention taking advantage of some presumably off-the-clock advice), and obsessively stock-piling multiples of the only model car for which he has any penchant: the '67 Mercury Cougar which had been the family car during happier times. He soon discovers a look-alike teenager and, convinced that the boy must be the product of some unknown indiscretion on his mother's part, coerces his sister into virtually abducting the youngster in order to glean the key to the apparent mystery. As the chaos of his life accelerates, Barlam is pressured into a liaison with an indifferent prostitute, the disastrous results of which may or may not spell doom for the deluded pushover. Subsequently, he embarks on a disorienting series of ill-advised trysts, descending into a shadowy murk of unprovoked violence, transgendered experimentation and mirage-like anomaly.
