Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird

Nicolas Jack Davies / Germany & United Kingdom / 2023 / International Premiere / 121 min

‘Promise me that if this ever gets weird, we can just stop, because there’s nothing more important than loving you’. So says Omar Rodríguez-López to his childhood friend and musical partner Cedric Bixler-Zavala one night in the year 2000, when they are making the album that will change both their lives forever. For ten years, they keep that pact as they reach for the stars in their alternative rock bands At the Drive-In and The Mars Volta. But friendship and love disappears in a haze of substances, Scientology, death and betrayal. And so the two friends must spend the next ten years trying to find each other again. Shot by the two of them throughout youth and adulthood with plenty of road dust on the camera lens, this film is a deeply unusual story about two young outsiders with Latin American roots who set their dreams of making a place for themselves in the world.