Clean, Shaven

Peter Winter has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. He has just come out of an institution and takes to the road in a car. He is looking for his daughter; the child was given up for adoption and he does not know where she is. Along the way he covers the windows with newspaper, tears out the mirrors and cannot listen to the radio. He believes something is inside his body; he cuts the skin and searches for a receiver. A child is killed in the same area and a detective starts following him. The narrative carries the two strands in parallel and what Peter did is never established. Lodge Kerrigan writes and directs; it is his first feature. Peter Greene plays Peter; Robert Albert and Megan Owen are in the cast. It is an American production. It was made on a very low budget and the production spread over years. Sound design is at its centre; radio interference, scraping and interior speech are heard constantly and the viewer hears what the character hears. The narrative does not explain the illness and offers no view from outside; the camera stands inside the character's perception. Some scenes are extremely uncomfortable and shown directly. It was screened at festivals and had difficulty finding distribution. The narrative does not use the detective strand as a means of resolution. Its limit is the watching; the narrative is unbearable by design and explains nothing anywhere. Who it is for: viewers who like hard independent cinema and formal experiment. Who it is not for: it is extremely uncomfortable, the self harm is explicit, and the narrative closed.