One of the highlights we caught at Fantasia International Film Festival in 2021 now has a home and it’s arriving sooner than expected. Theodore Schaefer’s debut feature Giving Birth to a Butterfly has been picked up by Cinedigm, who will release it in select theaters beginning May 1 before premiering on Fandor on May 16. The Lynchian fantasy tale, shot on 16mm, follows Annie Parisse as a suburban mom whose identity gets stolen. She begins to bond with her son’s pregnant girlfriend (Gus Birney) when they take a dreamlike, visually immersive road-trip journey to track down the perpetrators. Ahead of the release, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the trailer.
“Tapping into a nervous dream logic that still resembles the mad world we exist in, Giving Birth to a Butterfly is one of the most cine-literate American debuts I’ve seen in a while,” said Aaron Hillis, Director of Programming for Cinedigm. “Ted Schaefer is clearly a movie nut who understands both the mechanics and pleasures of genre storytelling.”
Jared Mobarak said in his Fantasia review, “In a very Lynchian way, everything we see exists to be taken with a grain of salt. The comedy is off-putting, overlong, and borderline confrontational. Allusions to Greek mythology (by way of The Simpsons) via names and mysteries (the Sirens will provide you want you need) appear throughout (probably more than my years-removed-from-college brain could ever pick out). And the blurred line separating reality from hallucination, waking life from dream, grows wider and wider until you almost have to wonder if anything we’ve witnessed is little more than a mirage. These are people trapped in cages of theirs and society’s making—attractions at their own personal zoos and circuses with the label ‘melancholic prisoners of life’s cruelly compounded existential weight.'”
See the exclusive trailer below.
Giving Birth to a Butterfly opens in U.S. theaters on May 1 and arrives on Fandor on May 16. The director will be in attendance for all screenings below, with more dates to come.
May 1, 2, 3 & 5 — Brooklyn, NY (Spectacle Theater)
May 4, 6 & 7 — New York, NY (Roxy Cinema New York)
May 9, 10 & 11 — North Hollywood, CA (Laemmle NoHo 7)