Julián Hernández — the Mexican filmmaker responsible for A Thousand Clouds of Peace, Broken Sky (Frameline30), and Raging Sun, Raging Sky — continues to push the boundaries of the arthouse film with his latest experiment in ensorcellment, I Am Happiness on Earth. Emiliano is a famous film director who confuses the process of artistic creation with sexual conquest; his filmic narratives interrupt his real life. He falls in love with and pursues wounded dancer Octavio, whom he hurts further by refusing to honor their partnership, adamantly contesting the aims of gay marriage, and practicing instead a philosophy of “two, among many,” in which the definition of his being in a relationship shifts as capriciously as his desires. He becomes a man on both sides of the lens, watched and watching, whose homoerotic voyeurism elicits a fantasy of bisexual relief. With a wink toward Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Hernández sifts absurd humor from the human pathos of lust, grounding happiness in an orgasmic fever dream.

Hernández’s films are erotic melodramas in which characters talk with their eyes and movements — creating ballets of desire and longing. As with dance, the bodies in Hernández’s films are charged with speaking to their audience; Hernández achieves this with a ravishingly handsome cast of young men and women who embody his now-familiar themes of first love’s singular intensity, the instructive power of betrayal, and the wistful nature of how regrets are illuminations come too late.