While Alex Gibney readies a feature documentary about Luigi Mangione for Hulu, filmmaker Liza Mandelup debuted an 8-minute short about the accused killer at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday.
Luigi, one of 54 shorts selected for the final festival in Park City, Utah, is actually less about the man and more about the cultural obsession that heated up in the wake of Mangione being arrested and charged in connection with the murder of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson in New York on Dec. 4, 2024.
“I’ve always been interested in online communities and fandom. Since his arrest, Luigi has skyrocketed to stardom with his image and likeness passed around the internet, made into shirts and been canvassed across the globe,” Mandelup tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I felt an energy around people who were supporting him and I wanted to hear what they had to say. This is not an indictment of the community who has placed their hopes in Luigi, but meant to explore the vigor and obsession behind the online wave that exalted him, even though he has yet to say a word.”
Mandelup explores that vigor and obsession by allowing a handful of Mangione supporters to step in front of her lens to reveal why they are so spellbound. It opens with Boo Paterson, an artist, writer and creative director, as she works on an oil painting titled “The People’s Husband.” She says she had planned to auction the piece and donate the proceeds to the healthcare costs of someone in need. “But I had so many messages. People were saying, ‘I need to have this on my phone.’ ‘I need to have this on my wall.’ ‘I need a t-shirt to wear and to work.’”
So she launched a merch store by splashing his image from her painting across a range of products like beach towels, water bottles, greeting cards, pillows and more. A one-piece swimsuit bearing Mangione’s face scored 189 orders in five minutes. “They love the swimsuit, man,” she said.
A young man gushes that Mangione is just the type he’d fall for on a dating app. “He’s got a pretty face, and I do have a history with Italians. So yes, I may or may not have fallen in love with Luigi. How can you not fall in love with someone who wants to be a voice for the people, especially for the underdog? That’s very swipe right behavior for me,” says the man.
Lustful fantasies are revealed by a 57-year-old woman who reads a love letter that she wrote to the incarcerated Mangione, who is 30 years her junior.
“Dear Luigi, I hope you’re managing okay in Brooklyn,” she says, referencing where he’s being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. “I’m 57 years old, and quite frankly, I’m torn up between wanting to fuck your big brains out or mom the shit out of you. Seriously, there’s not an hour that passes in my humdrum life where I don’t scour the web, searching for some news about you. I daydream about you, brainstorming about how we can fix this fucked up world we live in.”
Then the fantasy: “I get you a tall glass of water but I lose my balance, and you stand up to help me, and somehow my hands end up on your ripped six pack.” Later, she offers her home as a possible residence for Mangione if he ever were to be released. “If he’s set free, what then? I would want to, you know, make a room in my basement or something, and he could live there, but, what? What’s he gonna do? You know, he can’t stay there, like, prison again.”
An artist known as Princess Nostalgia performs rhymes from a Mangione-inspired track “Baby I’ll Be Your Mario.” She also reads a letter she prepared. “Dear Luigi, did you throw your life away, or did you exponentially increase its value? How does one measure the value of a life? I don’t have the answers to any of these questions, but you’ve certainly gotten me thinking,” she says, adding, “The people just feel so powerless. And one thing my dad always says is the people decide who the heroes are.”
The short also offers up a few brief conspiracy theories from its main subjects, like whether Mangione hired someone for the murder. One questions what really happened with the security footage from the scene. But it’s Princess Nostalgia who gets the last word: “Whether he did it or not, Luigi’s actions felt like a collective catharsis of a pent up rage and impotence that 99 percent of Americans can relate to, and right now, Luigi belongs to the people.”
Produced by Mandelup’s Docs Are Real People, Luigi was also produced by Lauren Cioffi and executive produced by Ryan Mazie for Floofy Doggy and Alexandra Dale for Rolling Stone Films. It had a world premiere at The Library as part of a documentary lineup at Sundance that also included Livia Albeck-Ripka and Victor Tadashi Suárez’s Still Standing; Ben Proudfoot’s The Baddest Speechwriter of All; Joey Izzo’s Going Sane: The Rise and Fall of the Center For Feeling Therapy; Lindsay McIntyre’s Tuktuit : Caribou; Arielle Knight’s The Boys and the Bees; and Jack Raese’s The Chimney Sweeper.
