I Believe in Unicorns (2014)

A road trip through the stunning and complex landscape of troubled young love.

Director:

Leah Meyerhoff

Writer:

Leah Meyerhoff

Stars:

Natalia Dyer, Peter Vack, Julia Garner

2 wins & 7 nominations.

Cast

Credited cast:
Natalia Dyer	...	Davina
Peter Vack	...	Sterling
Julia Garner	...	Cassidy
Amy Seimetz	...	Clara
Toni Meyerhoff	...	Toni
Rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Delano Montgomery	...	Skater
Sam O'Gotti	...	Friend
Johnny Sequoyah	...	Girl on scooter
Jane Stillwater	...	Biker

Storyline

Unicorns tells the story of an awkward teenage girl who escapes to a fantasy world when her first romantic relationship turns increasingly violent.

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Plot Keywords:

title directed by female | 

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Genres:

Drama

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Certificate:

TV-14

Details

Official Sites:

Official Facebook Official site

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

29 May 2015 (USA)

Also Known As:

Even Unicorns Need to Breathe

Filming Locations:

Berkeley High School, Berkeley, California, USA

Company Credits

Technical Specs

Runtime:

80 min

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.66 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

Though they did not share any scenes together, both Natalia Dyer and Amy Seimetz played roles in the hit Netflix show Stranger Things; as Nancy Wheeler (Dyer) and Becky Ives (Seimetz)

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Quotes

[first lines]
Davina: There's so much I want to say. But I don't know where to star.
[pause]
Davina: Today is my birthday. Today I will learn how to breathe.

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Soundtracks

Meet You Later
Written by Ian Vanek and Matt Reilly
Performed by Japanther

User Reviews

"There's so much I want to say. But I don't know where to start."

Experience, indeed, defies representation or articulate expression. Just as a photograph only captures one shot of a smooth manifold aggregate of lived phenomena, so language can only restrictedly encapsulate vibrancy. But one'd hope that a sequence of such photographs enables one to peer into that share of moments, brightening up memory and trajectories of thoughts, absorbing anew the cultivating spectrum of lived emotions. Breathe.

The opening credits alone immediately capture the spirit of this pure coming-of-age masterpiece. Ignoring the excusable whiny music, it alone was already so great and lingering that one'd want to stop and muse. Submergence into water necessitates the synergy of the liquid water's flows with the likewise fluid and variedly current half-obscured memories of growth intertwined with decay. Stopping for an instance, retreating below the surface, divine Davina feels the impact of the past. It's her birthday, but she's not yet ready to face it. Brooding on the past can perhaps help, before lurching further into uncertain future terrains, that will eventually also continually expand the mind's horizons.

Film itself captures the process. An acoustic-visual artificial succession of events, melded with and moulded by memory, fantasy, by movements of objects that defy physical laws. Stop-motion and time-lapse show the productive capabilities of the unconscious factory, and the fragmentary apprehension of spacetime. Shades of lights correspond to different intensities. One traverses heterogenous planes, exploring natural strata, and sensing the world. The hair billows through the wind, the skateboard grinds across the concrete, the clouds, the grass, crops, trees, endless telephone wires, ... they all reverberate, grafted from their respective denotations to dance within the partial subjective perspectives, poetic experimentation and flows. Stream of consciousness.

Divine Davina is in a state of becoming. The creation of memories contrasts with the stagnancy and deterioration of her mother. Touching her mother instills stifling anxieties of death and decomposition, the limit of possibilities - "la forme et l'essence divine / De mes amours décomposés". She still has a life ahead, and hence must venture into those fairy tales and badlands.

Becoming the nomadic voyager, wandering about. Dreaming and playing. Feeling the full spectrum of emotions. The unicorn and the dragon. Multivariate and recombining flinches of desire, sadness, happiness, loneliness, abandonment, comfort, disappointment, surprise, danger, warmth, coldness, excitement, pain, pleasure, ... transitions between various intensive states and interactions with a significant other, who's active and feeling too, differently, but reciprocally, within a changeable complex relationship.

Finally one has to digest the trip, make time for thought. The past becomes another series of photographs, pages of diaries, details, conclusions, and material mementos. And then one continues on, indefinitely.

"There's so much I want to say. But I don't know where to start."