‘ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS - Fabrizio Terranova’

When Huntington’s disease occurs, it changes everything: body, soul, moods, thoughts, emotions, energy... and also relationships with beloved ones. Undergoing the test that determines if one carries the genetic mutation already means a deep transformation of life. Six persons who are gene positive have decided to speak out in a film, Absolute Beginners. They are experiencing the onset of their disease, and they know that, when it comes to their metamorphosis, they will always be “Absolute Beginners”.

In this film, they share how they cope with HD in their life – past, present and future. They tell us how they gain empowerment and well-being, through acceptation of their difference, peer-to-peer meetings, and inventions from their own happiness-making genius. They are experts in searching what they need to reinvent themselves as they evolve together with the disease. Absolute Beginners is a film about the art of life as a perpetual metamorphosis.

After Josée Andrei: An Insane Portrait (2010) and Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival (2016), Fabrizio Terranova has produced Absolute Beginners in close collaboration with Dingdingdong. Created in France in 2012, Dingdingdong aims to produce knowledge about Huntington’s Disease through the experiences of the ones living with it, developing unique alliances with researchers and artists.

In the presence of Fabrizio Terranova and of the cofounders of Dingdingdong, Émilie Hermant (psychologist, writer) and Valérie Pihet (researcher). The screening will be preceded by a tribute to Woody Huntington Guthrie by Pierre Terranova.