It’s Hard to Be Human

God kicks his daughter out of heaven and won’t let her back in until she learns empathy. Agnes is an 18-year-old delinquent who just can’t figure out the point of it all – life on earth. Her brother, Oscar, is a cop. Her Father (God) is a busy man, a torn husband and too tired to father anyone. Her Mother self-medicates and lives to die. Peter, her best friend, is an addict and a poet. Larry, her lover, strives for duty, marriage and the norm, because that’s where his happiness is. And then there’s Victoria, an enlightened spirit who emanates heaven. She’s got something everyone wants and because Agnes can’t have her, wants to destroy her. The film begins with Agnes in the emergency room. She is in that space between life and death. We interweave her true-life story with this dreaming, almost-dead world. The pulse of the film is strummed out by the songs Agnes and her friends sing with their messed-up, longing hearts. Agnes was a pious girl turned sour. And in this journey we find out why she has abandoned God and why he’s forsaken her. It’s Hard to be Human, inspired by Swedish playwright August Strindberg’s A Dream Play, was shot using English, French and Tibetan. It elegantly poses the age-old questions of what it means to be human and how to have a connection with the Divine in a fallibly human world.

It’s Hard to be Human was chosen to open the 2018 Female Eye Film Festival.