Directors Statement
★
Directors Statement ★
When I was younger, I told fibs and tall tales, heightening the reality around me. As I got older, the fibs became half-truths, and the tales became lies. I lost friends. damaged relationships. experienced the consequences of not fully embracing my own authenticity.
As I entered adulthood, i found myself reflecting less on the lies themselves and more on why I told them. What was I protecting? Who was I trying to become? When did part of myself feel so unworthy that I needed to be reconstructed?
That question became the foundation of pathological.
At its core, pathological is not about deception. it’s about identity. it’s about the versions of ourselves we construct to be loved, desired, admired, or understood. sometimes the greatest lie we tell isn’t a singular story. it’s the belief that we must become someone else in order to deserve connection.
The film uses mirrors, reflections, photographs, and performances to explore the gap between who we are and who we present to the world. Every character in the film participates in that gap in some way. some lie to others. Some lie to themselves. some build entire identities around those lies.
over time, I realized that the most dangerous lies aren’t the ones we tell other people. they’re the ones we repeat to ourselves until they begin to feel like truth. once we believe them, everyone around us is forced to live inside them too.
Pathological explores the cost of that process: the relationships it fractures, the intimacy it prevents, and the loneliness that remains when the performance becomes impossible to maintain.
we’re all pathological in one way or another.
I was just the first to admit it.