Described as the “unacknowledged love child of Walerian Borowczyk, Kenneth Anger, and Jean Cocteau,” Bertrand Mandico is a prolific and singular filmmaker. He has directed over forty short films, medium-length works, TV commercials, musical films, and features, and co-created the Incoherence Manifesto with Icelandic filmmaker Katrín Ólafsdóttir.

Central to Mandico’s methodology is shooting on expired film stock (16mm, 35mm, or Super 8), relying exclusively on in-camera special effects, and filming without sound, with all sound constructed in post-production. The Wild Boys marks Mandico’s debut feature and sends audiences on a transgressive, gender-bending (and genre-bending) surreal voyage—what the filmmaker describes as a “Robinson Crusoe–style adventure à la Jules Verne and William Burroughs.”

The Wild Boys tells the story of five adolescent boys—each played by actresses—who are enamored with the arts yet irresistibly drawn toward crime and transgression. After committing a brutal act, aided by TREVOR, an uncontrollable deity of chaos, they are punished by being forced aboard a ship captained by a man determined to discipline their ferocious appetites.

Stranded on a lush and dangerous island where pleasure and peril coexist, the boys begin to undergo profound transformations of both mind and body. Shot in sumptuous 16mm and brimming with eroticism, gender fluidity, and dark humor, The Wild Boys is a hallucinatory coming-of-age odyssey that lingers long after the screen fades to black.

Preceded by a short film by Bertrand Mandico.