Caveh Zahedi's Gotham Award-winning autobiographical comedy, "I Am a Sex Addict," manages the difficult task of being both genuinely funny and utterly sincere. Zahedi uses re-enactments, documentary footage, and camera address to tell the real life story of his struggle with sex addiction.
The film opens with documentary footage of a 43-year-old Caveh standing in a church alcove, just before he is about to get married for the third time. Caveh explains to the audience that his past two marriages failed because of his addiction to prostitutes, a problem that he now claims to have overcome. Caveh proceeds to narrate the story of how his addiction started, flashing back to a re-enactment of himself in his mid-twenties, walking down a street in Paris, encountering a prostitute for the first time. But then Caveh breaks the frame, telling the audience, "Actually, I wasn't able to raise enough money to go to Paris, so I'm just going to shoot it here in San Francisco, which is where I live now." What follows is the story of Caveh's sex addiction-how it started, how it spiraled out of control and destroyed all his love relationships, and how he was finally able to stop. |