Samantha Anne Carrillo

by Samantha Anne Carrillo
I was a clumsy child. Water was the one place I felt physically powerful, sometimes even graceful. My after-school dance classes—ballet, jazz, tap and modern—seemed somehow to amplify my constant sense of awkwardness. But I naturally excelled at swimming, and I enjoyed the lessons and the practice. My favorite part of visiting the county pool or our modest, backyard above-ground was floating. Parallel to Earth, unburdened by gravity, eyes toward the sky, I felt wei...

by Samantha Anne Carrillo
The mayor’s anti-panhandling initiative distracts from the real problem of homelessness
Mayor Berry's new anti-panhandling campaign consists of 30 blue street signs directing people in need to dial 311, and those who want to help to go to United Way website donateABQ.org. After dialing 311—during the hours of 6am to 9pm Monday through Saturday and 9am to 6pm on Sundays—a representative will read the City's website to you. Introducing this initiative, Berry used thi...

Directed by Lars von Trier
Cast: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgard, Christian Slater, Stacy Martin, Shia LaBeouf
by Samantha Anne Carrillo

Whether you root for polymaths or specialists, Dutch auteur Lars von Trier's thematically connected “Depression Trilogy” tests audiences' beliefs about the ownership of knowledge using high-pitched melodrama, gender dynamics, body horror and death anxiety. In Antichrist's verdant grotesquerie, “He” (Willem Dafoe) is an emotionally constipated heads...

The Divine Order (2017)

Directed by Petra Volpe

Cast: Marie Leuenberger, Maximilian Simonischek, Therese Affolter, Nicholas Ofczarek

by Samantha Anne Carrillo

The personal is absolutely political, and idealistic revelations do make for terrific revolutionary metaphor. But something called “peer pressure” is often the most direct catalyst for truly meaningful social change. Swiss screenwriter-director Petra Volpe deftly illustrates the subversive power of communal coercion in the Swiss suffr...

Little Sister Turns the Tragic to Magic
by Samantha Anne Carrillo
Equal parts veteran homecoming narrative, dark family dramedy, and devotional rom-com, Zach Clark’s Little Sister evokes the horror of war, the emotional landmines of the nuclear family, and a young woman’s call to serve a higher power.
Writer-director Clark cut his teeth on the indie film festival circuit, scoring a cult hit with White Reindeer in 2013. In that crowdfunded, tragicomic outing, a milquetoast realtor copes with h...

Feminist Thriller Makes Its Presence Felt
by Samantha Anne Carrillo
Even as a panoply of untested rape kits decompose and gather dust, the filmic trope of rape as entertainment is alive and well. And social horror film Felt serves as a cultural antidote to the embedded, normalized nature of sexual violence.
Created collaboratively by director Jason Banker (Toad Road) and artist/activist Amy Everson, Felt‘s feminist narrative draws on the latter’s real-life experiences and provocative art. Fel...

by Samantha Anne Carrillo
Albuquerque Herbalism founder Dara Saville is in a long-term relationship with riparian restoration work and the re-planting of native plants in the Bosque.
As a longtime volunteer for the Bosque Ecological Monitoring Program (BEMP), Saville also acted as the catalyst for The Yerba Mansa Project’s formation. In partnership with the City’s Open Space Division, the project is restoring native plants to the Bosque while remaining attentive to educational outreach on the...

Since moving to Burque in 2002, I’ve made an effort to immerse myself in the artistic and cultural output of the high desert. Only recently did I realize that those artists and collectives whose work intensely resonates with me generally share two traits: experience embracing and thriving within categories of “otherness” and a genuine curiosity for the actual (read: not sanitized) history of New Mexico.
So much of the Southwest mythos hinges on oversimplified, paternalistic tropes that spotli...

Within its 15-minute run time, Jehad N. Al-Khateeb’s 2016 indie short “A Town Called Theocracy” manages to underscore the danger of government censorship while successfully executing several other story lines.

New Mexican director Steve “Fenix” Maes has been on the “Longmire” set in Santa Fe all week, filming the sixth and final season of middle America’s most-beloved cop drama. Over one lunch break and two cell phones, Samantha Anne Carrillo caught up with Maes to discuss his forthcoming feature documentary on the “rocker” subculture, "Caffeine & Gasoline: Evolution of the American Rocker," for OneHeadlightInk.com.

The architecture and aesthetic of New Mexico’s capital city is so iconic that Santa Fe’s very name is used as a shortcut to describe a visual style. From Georgia O’Keeffe’s imagery of Rancho de Taos, animal skulls and Jimson weed to the historic adobe cityscape, Santa Fe offers entertainment, sustenance and eye candy for travelers of all sorts.

Much like the mainstream media's depiction of inimitable actor, author and director Crispin Hellion Glover himself—eccentric, downright strange and maybe even slightly dangerous—his "It" films aren't your average multiplex fare. Samantha Anne Carrillo chats with Glover about his own films, his Big Slide Shows and the reason he still cringes when fans think he was in "Back to the Future II."

Samantha Anne Carrillo examines the origins of a radioactive leak at WIPP.

The first assurance that Crystal Eaters ain't your average indie fantasy novel is its descending page count. Shane Jones' fabulist, existential coming-of-age novel starts on page 183. Hyperlocal lore has it that each newborn human possesses 100 crystals. Accidents, illness and the passage of time deplete individual counts. More than a simplistic metaphor, this semiprecious symbolism sets in motion its own cosmology.

Samantha Anne Carrillo shares a playlist wherein post-punk imitates absurdist, existentialist, dystopian, gothic, sci-fi and transgressive fiction as interpreted by the experimental, new wave, noise, pop, post-punk and protopunk genres.