BIRTHMARK 2019

Inspired by a flashback about his birthmark, filmmaker Lester Alfonso is convinced that making a film will help confront a distant trauma rooted in cultural superstition. A follow-up to his award-winning film Twelve (2009), BIRTHMARK is a wry, sensitive, and candidly confessional exercise in creative anthropology. Soliciting fellow mark-bearers to add their testimonies to his own, Lester documents his journey to find peace and forgiveness, and to quiet the voice in his head. “It’s not only about the marks we are born with but the marks we imagine for ourselves.”