The Monster and the Peanut

 
Credits
2005, 22 mins. (AFI)
Director: Franklin Jin Rho
Writer: Albert Crim
Producer: Brian Udovich
Executive Producers: Ed Carrier, Bobbie Carrier
Editor: David Kashevaroff
Director of Photography: Darren Genet
Production Designer: Arjuna Imel
Composer: Mark Schulz
Cast: Bo Foxworth, Anne Ramsey, Dean Haglund, Alyssa Baric, Pablo Moix
 
About
The Monster and the Peanut treads daring territory for a science film. This film about a man who believes the tragic death of his young daughter can be explained by the rules of traffic flow suggests that for some people, science, the repository of reason, becomes a substitute religion, a place to go to explain away the troubling uncertainty of the world.

Screenwriter Albert Crim explains that he wanted to explore "the inability to move on past certain catastrophic events, and the unwillingness to accept the randomness of these events." Of his protagonist, who desperately scans the patterns of Los Angeles traffic in order to come to terms with his child's death, Crim says, "Bo definitely lost himself in the mathematics of traffic as a way of avoiding what he felt was his own role in his daughter's death. It wasn't just that he had to make sense of her death; he had to make sense of it in a way that absolved him of guilt. But when he runs into the nonlinear aspects of traffic, he finds his illusory path to redemption blocked."

A native of Queens, New York, now residing in California, Crim has made several short films at the American Film Institute.
 
Online Resources
Traffic Waves, Science Hobbyist
The Monster and the Peanut on imdb.com