Learn this name: Rosa Salazar. The DC-born actress is already primed to have a killer 2019. This winter, audiences will get to see her starring alongside Sandra Bullock in the thriller Bird Box. Then in early 2019, she’ll be introduced to the world as the titular character of Robert Rodriguez’s high-octane spectacle Alita: Battle Angel. But before you see her in full-blown action mode, you should take a look at what her own brand of caustic humor can look like.
Her short, Good Crazy, which she wrote, directed, and starred in is a low-key comedy skewering LA culture through the eyes of a Latina. One who rolls her eyes when her boyfriend says “Adiós!” to a group of her neighbors, who can’t stand inane conversations about the Hadids when she’d rather be picking litter off the streets, and who finds that it’s too hard to get a driver who just ran over a coyote to do the right thing.
Shot with a naturalistic style and an ear for awkward comedy, Salazar’s short follows Rosa who is, as the film’s title suggests, “good crazy.” As Salazar told Vimeo, “It’s about being a person who has an interesting code, if you will. You see, there’s crazy crazy — someone who is completely irrational and lacks the awareness to be a functional member of society. And then there’s good crazy — a person who fights the everyday injustices, a social crusader, often misunderstood and thus intimidating to others due to a severe case of ‘wokeness.’ Because women are by nature intuitive creatures, we possess that ‘wokeness’ and are unfortunately susceptible to being lumped in with the crazy crazies.”
Take a look at the short in full below.