In attendance: Richard Kelly


In 1920, Robert Frost described two roads in a yellow wood. More than 85 years later, filmmaker Richard Kelly, director of the cult favorite DONNIE DARKO, takes the one less traveled. In one of the year’s most anticipated films, Kelly takes us on a journey into a parallel reality. The year is 2008, the place is Los Angeles, and Boxer Santos (Dwayne Johnson), an action star, has married into the political world. (Sound familiar?) His budding relationship with porn star and business mogul Krysta Now leads to a screenplay that may or may not be an accurate prediction of the end of the world. And it only gets stranger from there.  

Kelly's vast, visionary story encompasses a new US security program that identifies all Internet activity by fingerprint, a new wireless energy system called Liquid Karma and radical neo-Marxists who seek to disrupt the power structures that loom above them. In addition to his ambitious story, Kelly has assembled –one of the most original and diverse casts in recent memory, with Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mandy Moore, Miranda Richardson, Jon Lovitz, Kevin Smith, Wallace Shawn and, as a cherry on top, Justin Timberlake (who lip-synchs from behind a scarred face).

This most unexpected political satire is an incredibly funny and trenchant film, a wry commentary on the nature of identity and power in a celebrity culture. Ideas and images from this alternate, Orwellian near future come at us with a dizzying pace, offering a shiny corporate-sponsored vision of a future on the edge of apocalypse. So grab a can of Krysta Now, a couple of alternate fingerprints, and your ticket to the Mega-Zeppelin. The future is here and it’s far more futuristic than you might expect.

For ticketing information please phone 1.866.AFI FEST or email boxoffice@afi.com