About Salamander

Salamander is a Master of Fine Arts thesis film at the American Film Institute. It is a very personal film about gaining maturity and the quest to understand love and sex. By turns humorous and tragic, the film follows John and Sarah, a young couple on the verge of either a breakthrough or a breakdown in their strained relationship.

John is haunted by Sarah’s previous lover, Brett, who is now a successful sex manual illustrator. As John digs deeper into Sarah’s past, he becomes increasingly obsessed with the details of her relationship with Brett. Sarah, disgusted and hurt by John’s obsession, tries to re-focus his energy on their current relationship.

They discover that both of their goals could potentially be realized by re-enacting moments from Sarah’s relationship with Brett. But when they do so, it plummets them into a vicious cycle of fixation and estrangement that threatens to overpower the love they feel for one another.