When he was 17, Ben-Hur Uribe blacked out at an Aerosmith concert. He had been tripping on acid and was getting paranoid. “I felt fantastic,” he recalls, “so I yelled that I’d buy soda for everyone in the stadium. Then all these vendors began to converge on me. I thought they were going to hit me with stones.” He shut his eyes, and when he opened them again he was staring at the white walls of a mental ward.
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Paranoia and a touch of the surreal inform Uribe’s darkly comic video short, It’s All About Me, which premieres this weekend in the Chicago Latino Film Festival. “I went straight after that experience,” he says. “It was tough, probably tougher had I not discovered the movies. Filmmaking has been therapeutic. It has been my salvation.”
Uribe himself started dealing drugs. He made enough to buy a fancy sports car, but barely graduated Whitney Young. After that fateful Aerosmith show, Uribe enrolled in a remedial program at Southern Illinois University. Several years later, he transferred to New York University, where he made his first short film. “It was exhilarating, I felt in control of a process,” he says. But that didn’t fix his paranoia, which was growing stronger. It took him five more years to finish college, and he stayed in New York for another eight years, and was seldom in touch with his mother, whom he blamed for his troubles.
