Animals Distract Me, excerpt

written & directed by Isabella Rossellini

Discovery Planet Green/ double wide media

Animals Distract Me, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival, follows actress Isabella Rossellini as she and her future guide dog Sweety visit Manhattan for the day. But even during a conversation with Vogue editor André Leon Talley and lunch with chef Mario Batali, she finds herself distracted … by the animals around her.

Whether it’s the demodex on her eyelashes, the crickets in Central Park, or her own dog, she is full of questions. Fortunately, she is visited by Charles Darwin, who explains to Isabella his theory of evolution and the behaviors of the animals that fascinate her.

Part auto-biography, part historical re-enactment, and part fantastic imagining, Animals Distract Me is about discovering the joys in nature and asking the deeper questions, the ones that don’t always have an answer.