“Superheroes don’t hurt.”
A modern day fairy tale · Written & directed by Kyle Cassie
Logline
A socially inept young man frozen by childhood trauma navigates adult life from behind a superhero mask and a child’s BMX bike, until he collides with a painfully shy woman hiding behind a secret identity even stranger than his.
Synopsis
A darkly comedic modern fairy tale about love, loss, and Nicolas Cage.
Birk lost his mother when he was a small boy, and some part of him never grew past that day. Now in his late twenties in Copenhagen, he still rides his child-sized BMX through the city in a superhero mask and cape, and keeps the books for a small-time crook. His first real try at romance ends badly when the influencer he’s dating turns out to want him only as content.
On a midnight ride he spots a woman stranded by the road, panics, and leaves her there. By the time he turns back, she’s gone. Then she knocks on his door.
Rosanna is shy to the point of exile, and she’s hiding a secret stranger than his: deep down, she wants to be Nicolas Cage. Over one night of film quotes, disco light and confessions, 2 people the world never quite knew what to do with find out that their particular kinds of broken fit together.
“The script feels fresh, mainly because it walks such a fine line between humor and tragedy. Overall, this is a story brimming with ideas and imagination.”The Golden Script Competition
Theme. The disguises we use to hide are the same ones that finally get us seen.
Official trailer
Cast
Hjalte Ilsøe
Played Hamlet for BBC Radio 3 in Hamlet Noir and appeared in Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built.
Emilie Ullerup
Danish-born actor working in film and television since 2006, and Executive Producer on BMX.
Odin Mørkøv Armstrong-Ullerup
Introducing Odin, our boy hero.
Iris Thomsen
Copenhagen actor and dancer whose credits include The Lawyer and Den udvalgte.
Kyle Cassie
A small-time crook whose menace keeps getting undercut by his own father.
Tone and look
Like Punch-Drunk Love, it’s a story about a man whose emotional wiring simply doesn’t match the world’s expectations, and whose love story is, as a result, tender, strange, and a little bit violent. Like Amélie, it’s saturated with visual whimsy and romantic idealism, built around a core belief: that the truly odd find each other because of their oddness, not despite it.
Shot in Copenhagen and the Danish countryside
Director’s statement
I’m drawn to stories about hopeless hearts struggling to find each other. BMX is a fairy tale about two of them, a grown man hiding behind a kid’s bike and a superhero costume to mask childhood trauma and a woman quietly wishing she was Nicolas Cage so she’d have courage to meet the world… who both discover that their specific brands of brokenness fit together perfectly. Entertaining without cruelty, strange without mockery. A symphony of effort and failure that makes the broken parts visible enough to become healed.
Kyle Cassie
Kyle Cassie is a writer-director based in Los Angeles, drawn to tragic human stories: underdogs and anti-heroes, impossible situations, the darker side of fairy tales, always with a playful, slightly tormented lens.
His debut short, ANTi-SOCiAL, a tragicomic thriller he wrote, directed, produced, edited and colored, world-premiered at Indie Short Fest Los Angeles and won Best Actress, Best Young Actor and an Outstanding Achievement Award there, with nominations for Best Director, Best Cinematography and Best Fantasy Short. It also won Best Cinematography at Venice Shorts. The screenplay placed in the top 8 worldwide at the Slamdance Screenplay Competition.
BMX, shot in Copenhagen, is his second narrative short, and again he wrote, directed, edited and colored it himself.
Behind the scenes
Watch the behind the scenes
In the company of
Punch-Drunk Love meets Amélie
2002 · Paul Thomas Anderson
2001 · Jean-Pierre Jeunet
2010 · Richard Ayoade
1971 · Hal Ashby
Contact
Mr Hyde Films
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