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Rosario's Ills

June 29, 2009

Winner of three awards at the South by Southwest Film Festival, including the Audience Award, the limited-release drama Explicit Ills (Peace Arch, Street: July 21) marks the debut feature film from actor Mark Webber, who also wrote the script. Set in Philadelphia, the film follows four interconnecting stories about love, drugs and poverty and features a star turn by Rosario Dawson, who plays a single mother trying to support herself and her asthma-stricken son, Babo (precocious Francisco Burgos). In a conference call with journalists, Dawson spoke about the project and its message of hope.

VB: Explicit Ills deals with several social issues, including healthcare and poverty. How does the film successfully manage to convey its message without becoming preachy?
Dawson: The movie takes its time getting to know the different characters before making huge, sweeping statements. And they’re all such different people. The idea of these characters being so multi-dimensional in their hedonism, from “I’m going to do a bunch of drugs and be careless and not think about anything” to “I’m going to try to build a community center and create a march and use my frustration and anger toward something positive.” All those different people you recognize. Mark wrote this script because this is what he knows; this is how he grew up. He has participated in marches; he has been homeless, living in his car. These are real issues to him in a deep way, and he decided to tell a personal story. And people outside of his sphere are really seeing that, because things have gotten so bad. A movie like this couldn’t be coming out at a better time. And the social aspects of this film couldn’t be heard better than right now, where it doesn’t feel like it’s preachy, but there actually could be answers and solutions to some of these problems. And maybe there can be a way that we can come together, and we don’t have to be victims.

VB: What can we do to solve the problems of poverty and healthcare?
Dawson: It’s getting back into that Network time. I want someone to get on the microphone who can actually reach people and tell them to throw open their windows and say, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” It’s still shocking to me what we’ve done recently as a nation—that we’ve participated in our electoral process in a really big way. But the work has just begun. And I think it’s going to continue to require community building, talking to your representative, passing legislation, putting pressure on the people who are working for us to make this country better. Stories like this can help provoke that. The DVD is out, and people can pass it to each other. It can make a difference. We can start getting an understanding of what’s going on out there. And the more we keep talking about them, the better opportunity we have for educating younger people, who are going to be inheriting all of these problems that we’ve created. And they’re going to be able to create real solutions for themselves.

VB: What extras are included on the DVD?
Dawson: We actually did the [March for Our Lives] for real, so we have all of that on video. There are going to be some really interesting extras. The [filming] process was really fascinating and full-on. Shooting in Philadelphia in these neighborhoods with all these abandoned buildings was very real.

VB: What feedback have you heard so far about the film?
Dawson: People are really blown away by [Mark’s] work as a first-time director. It’s such a perfectly timed film for what’s going on right now. I know people who’ve seen it, and it was everything that’s gone on in the country, with the amount of people who’ve lost their jobs and their homes and the economic crisis. All of that is so provocative right now. Even when we were shooting it, we all knew we were doing something special. Even more now, I feel like the story needs to be told.

Posted by Cheryl Cheng on June 29, 2009 | Comments (0)