DIRECTOR STATEMENT
Punk rock. Disenfranchised BIPOC teens. Creepy space aliens. Queer young romance. It’s the underdog-buddy-comedy-space opera I’ve been waiting to tell ever since I was an angsty Latin American kid shrieking into a mic and cranking my guitar amp to 11.

In the late nineties, as a Venezuelan teen coming of age in Southeast Asia, I had already grown up on four continents, uprooted into a cornucopia of places and cultures. I developed an abiding fascination with faraway worlds--and an intimate knowledge of the power of DIY punk culture to build bridges across language and cultures. When I fell in love with filmmaking it was just a matter of time before I mixed punk rock into my own films.

One last thing. To me, characters make the movie. And I’ve always loved movies where the characters are thrown into unbelievable adventures. The one thing that was missing in those amazing stories I watched growing up: diversity of representation, including my own Latin identity. Now that I create the characters that populate my films, it’s where my work begins.

DIRECTOR BIO

JAVIER BADILLO
Javier Badillo is a Leo nominated, Venezuelan-Canadian writer, director and producer. After a career as a musician and 2D animator, Javier found a natural fit in independent film. Since 2008, his short films have been selected and won awards at numerous festivals including Chicago Children’s Film Festival, Cinéfest Sudbury, Flickers' Rhode Island, and Reelworld, among many others.

In 2022, Javier released his first feature film, the war drama ROADS OF ITHRIYAH, receiving five Leo Award nominations including best picture, best directing, best lead actor, and best script, winning for best sound. It was nominated as Best Canadian Film at RIFFA.

Javier is currently preparing to shoot his second feature film, the Latinx punk rock, sci-fi action comedy LUPE Q AND THE GALACTIC EARWORMS. The project received financial support from Telefilm, CreativeBC, Shaw Rocket Fund, CMF, and New Dawn (Nederlands Filmfond).

NAT MARSHIK (Co-Writer, Associate Producer)
Born and raised in North Vancouver, BC, Nat holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honours from McGill University, where she majored in Gender Studies, and a Fine Arts Diploma from Langara College.

From 2010 to 2016, Nat was active in Vancouver’s poetry and creative writing communities, producing the poetry chapbooks riverveins, Outlines, and Face to the Wind, and the short memoir MILK IT! She was awarded the poetry mentorship prize by Plenitude Queer Literary Magazine in 2014, and in 2016 her queer short memoir, The Rabbit, was a finalist for Room Magazine’s creative non-fiction prize.

In 2020, her short screenplay THE LANTERN (co-written with Javier Badillo) was a finalist for the Reel Work Filmmaking Initiative script competition (BIPOC TV & Film Toronto). In 2021, her feature comedy screenplay LUPE Q AND THE GALACTIC EARWORMS (co-written with Javier Badillo) received development funding from Telefilm Canada and CreativeBC, and was one of 12 projects selected for the inaugural Blood in the Snow Genre Development Lab in Toronto. By day, Nat provides professional bookkeeping services to arts & environmental non-profits.