You Were My First Boyfriend

“Every finger in the room is pointing at me.” –Tori Amos, “Crucify”

The landscape of teen cinema is about to get a total rewrite as veteran Florida Film Festival alumna Cecilia Aldarondo (Landfall, Grand Jury Award, FFF 2020) returns to Winter Park, Florida, to confront her demons and exorcise her past life. Using a hybrid of intimate personal-essay footage and surreal reenactments, Aldarondo and co-director Sarah Enid Hagey dissect teen angst though the lens of fantasy in an effort not to just confront trauma, but to determine if the psychological significance was real or imagined. As a Puerto Rican girl in a predominantly white, upper-middle class, Catholic school, Aldarondo spent her days trying to fit in to the cool clique and her nights drifting off in dreams of Merchant/Ivory romance often leaving even her closest friends adrift in the wake of her obsessions. If there is one universal life truth, it’s that no one gets out without some scars. One of the great thought experiments asks if you would go back to high school, knowing what you know now. The answer typically depends on how good or bad your experience was the first time around. But, really, if you could, would you? With You Were My First Boyfriend, Aldarondo and Hagey bravely confront these possibilities with rawness, open honesty, and depth. In Aldarondo’s own words: “I face my teen ghosts on behalf of every weirdo that ever lived. I go home so you don’t have to.”