passover
a kevin lucero less film
PASSOVER a Kevin Lucero Less film official web site
A man who admitted killing and eating an acquaintance he met on the Internet was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, following his retrial in a case that engrossed and appalled Germany.
Armin Meiwes ( Decklan Quinn ), a 44 year old computer technician, also was convicted of disturbing the peace of the dead. His lawyers had argued that the Frankfurt state court should instead convict him of the lesser offense of "killing on demand", on the grounds that he was only following his victim's wishes.
The retrial of Meiwes opened in January 2006. It was held after a federal appeals court overturned his initial manslaughter conviction to allow prosecutors to seek a tougher sentence. At the retrial, Meiwes renewed a detailed confession, telling the court his version of the grisly details of the March 2001 killing of Bernd Juergen Brandes ( Jean Pussan ) at Meiwes' home in the central town of Rotenburg.
Meiwes said Brandes, who had traveled from Berlin after answering his Internet posting under the pseudonym "Franky" seeking a young man for "slaughter and consumption", wanted to be stabbed to death after drinking a bottle of cold medicine to lose consciousness. He testified that Brandes, 43, had wanted to "be eaten alive". "Otherwise, I would never have done it," Meiwes, who captured the killing on video, told the court during the trial. Meiwes also maintained that Brandes had urged him to carry out further killings after his death. Still, the defendant claimed he had hesitated before going through with the act. "I wanted to eat him, I didn't want to kill him," he told the court.
This is the news story that inspired the motion picture Passover, in April of 2006. I was drawn to the idea of two very different people, meeting on the Internet, with a hunger of self destruction. It was important that this film deal with the internal motives of the individuals, rather than the violence they inflicted on each other. With this doctrine in mind, I decided to make it personal. What if the motives of one character in the story, were equal to that of my own? The Character of Jean Pussan is formed out of my own personal desires to fight a society that is consumed by apathy. Decklan Quinn, Jean's rival, is the character in the story, who mirrors a society ultimately impressed with itself and lacking both emotion and a conscience for its actions.
I have often felt that our Jewish tradition of Passover is a premature celebration. Jean's Passover is a contemporary adaptation of the Jewish tradition, replacing the Exodus from Egypt, with the Exodus from modern society. The traditional Seder foods are replaced with tools of mutilation ( knife, bone saw, acid etc. ) and the Haggadah reading is replaced with a speech of capitulation. Decklan Quinn is used metaphorically, not only as a society out of control, but also as the dictator over the slave.
It is my hope, as with any provoking contemporary art, that the film Passover will require close inspection and stir up that long-lost practice called .... "thought". - Kevin Lucero Less
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