It’s the third in Shea’s trilogy of trauma-horror features.
Bayview Entertainment has released FLORENCE, from independent filmmaker Skip Shea; it’s streaming now on Fandango at Home, FlixFling, Hoopla and Crunchyroll and coming to Tubi in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain and Australia on January 27. Featuring scenes shot in Rome by veteran director Luigi Cozzi, it stars Aurora Grabill, Patrick Bracken, Tiziana Guarini, Demetri Kasperson, Mike Mars, Damien Gaudet and Diana Porter. The synopsis: “The film follows Florence, who, after sharing a drink with a ‘priest,’ is thrust into a hallucinatory confrontation with her past, traversing shifting circles of hell while a masked killer pushes her toward the edge of sanity.”
FLORENCE rounds out Shea’s Metamodern Trilogy, begun with TRINITY and continued by the Rondo Hatton Award-winning SEEDS. Says the filmmaker, who based the movies on past trauma in his own life, “FLORENCE became a film about how we narrate ourselves. How meaning and identity shifts when the world stops making sense. Absurdism became a way forward.”
The PR further explains, “Many of Shea’s works engage with the Catholic Church and abuse, but FLORENCE marks the most direct confrontation yet. Embracing Werner Herzog’s theory of finding the static truth in the story, some scenes were filmed inside the former House of Affirmation where Shea’s clergy abuse took place. After the building later burned and collapsed, Shea returned to film among the ruins—a visual reclamation of space and history.”
