Mark your calendars for the european premiere dates of Homo Pop Gun, starting in Berlin today. In the meantime enjoy the personal insights by Francisco Saco.

My ex-girlfriend was a documentary filmmaker. Her taste for films was always high-caliber, usually mocking me for the shit blockbuster mega epics I always shelled out cash for in the summer. But whenever she was back home and wanted to reconnect with her sister, they would go ahead and rent romantic comedies as a way of hanging out and decompressing, just watching rubbish love fulfilment garbage. I of course always derided her for it, how she could taint her very high-brow taste with such dirge. Ultimately she dragged me into it, getting me to watch these safest boy-meets-girl stories of pure drivel. I complied as the good boyfriend should, but always with a certain amount of restraint, until finally these films and shows would win me over and I found myself being more into them than my ex herself! And I really resented her for that! 

What you get from these films and shows is a crystalline view of the world, one in where perfection and commitment and ultimate happiness are all achievable and attainable by the main characters. Of course, they have to jump through their fair share of hurdles, but in the end they get what they want. And so does the audience, they get their 90 minutes worth of release from their everyday humdrum goings-on. I could never relate to such escapism. The gooeyness of it all never appealed to me, or never really fit my view of the world. I could never get over the fact that these were merely stories about people who didn’t really need to struggle to get what they wanted.

Eventually my ex and I broke up (I got my ass dumped) and skate filming became the outlet, the place I poured out over what I was going through. It had become the form I had chosen to express my anger, frustration, resentment and loneliness, and something to escape all that as well. Being an obsessive filmer, I couldn’t put down the camera after finishing my last video “Video Diays”. I had amassed a sizeable amount of extra footage and decided to keep going at it, not totally sure where it was going to lead. What was certain was the theme I was going to choose for this next video: Love. For some odd reason I can’t make these skate videos without attaching some theme to them. It helps me get over the tediousness and boredom some videos seem to emanate. I want to make videos the way I want to see them and at times something so overloaded with just skating and skate imagery doesn’t do it for me. So I decided I was going to create something referencing all those romcoms I had to sit through as a catharsis, as a way of helping me get over this woman who had meant the world to me. My hope was that from all the shit I was going through something really worthwhile would come out of it.

So that’s what Homo Pop Gun is. It’s at times a cynical critique on our obsession for perfect romance and at other times a very open gushing-over for moments of intimacy and true companionship. If skating can at times be marketed as homoerotic, then there can also be moments of true kinship and real love between those same people. The term ‘bromance’ isn’t simply a joke this time around. And as the story progresses in Homo Pop Gun, we see a relationship evolve from the moment in which that person is single to where he finds the right match to finally maybe, just maybe get what he wants. In the end, Homo Pop Gun is probably as predictable as most Hollywood love stories are. But at least there’s more of a struggle here. Or at least more sweaty dudes getting their asses beat on the concrete.

For all its worth, probably not much, this one video here is dedicated to my ex.  /Francisco Saco