Director · Screenwriter · Producer · Editor · Cinematographer

Gregg Araki

3: briefs
13:00: average
39 min: in total

On film.briefs3

Nowhere

Gregg Araki · 1997

Gregg Araki’s 1997 surrealist teen film Nowhere follows a day in the lives of Los Angeles college students whose realities blur with alien visitations, televised sermons, and violent ruptures. Stylised, saturated, and deliberately unmoored from narrative cause and effect, it is the final chapter of Araki’s Teenage Apocalypse trilogy — a controlled descent into emotional and visual extremity, sustained by tight editing, a defining alt-rock soundtrack, and a cast performing in tones of weary detachment.

13:00

The Doom Generation

Gregg Araki · 1995

Gregg Araki’s 1995 film follows three teenagers — Jordan, Amy and X — as they flee after a convenience-store killing, descending into surreal violence across Los Angeles. Shot on a $800,000 budget, it merges teen drama, black comedy and thriller tropes with deadpan delivery, saturated night photography, and a synth-heavy score. Though critically divided and commercially unsuccessful, it endures as a defining artefact of 1990s American indie cinema — less for its plot than for its uncompromising tonal architecture.

13:00

Totally F***ed Up

Gregg Araki · 1993

Totally F***ed Up (1993) is Gregg Araki’s debut in his Teenage Apocalypse trilogy: a 78-minute, 16 mm arthouse drama following six queer teenagers in Los Angeles. Made with no crew beyond Araki himself, a sound person, and the cast, it uses handheld camerawork, episodic structure, and documentary-style interviews to portray love, violence, grief, and daily life without moralising or exposition. Its power lies in its restraint, authenticity, and refusal to render queerness as either problem or spectacle.