

There is nothing happy or upbeat about this film.
Bjork stalker video diary full#
Instead, he opted to create a bomb full of acid and hide it in a book that he sent her, with the plan to end with him then killing himself. At one point, he was going to send a package rigged with HIV-contaminated needles, but discovered how complex that would really be.

Bjork stalker video diary trial#
Throughout The Video Diary of Ricardo Lopez, we see his plan slowly form, through trial and error, to lead up to his ultimate decision. This set Lopez off, and he decided that he must kill Bjork. Until 1996, when he found out Bjork was dating the musician known as Goldie – a black guy. He sent her fan letters, he thought about her all the time, he wished he could go back in time and become friends with her as a child – he loved Bjork. Absolutely obsessed in a way that became unhealthy. So, what did Lopez do? Well, when he was young, he found himself infatuated with the Icelandic singer/former member of the Sugarcubes, Bjork. What Ricardo Lopez did and tried to do was not a good thing by any stretch of the imagination, but to simply label him a “lunatic” is short-sighted and overly simplifying the reality of the situation.
Bjork stalker video diary movie#
It’s easy to write people off as “crazy,” especially when they do something so out of the ordinary and unexpected, but that is exactly the reason director Sami Saif (a documentarian who has also released films covering his own search for his father, the making of Lars von Trier’s Dogville, and most recently Tommy, about Danish singer/songwriter Tommy Seebach) put this movie together. We get a very honest impression of what Ricardo Lopez, a young man, a human most importantly, was going through. Simply by existing as a documentary available to us, The Video Diary of Ricardo Lopez serves as a case study of depression and self-destructive behavior and delusion.

The Video Diary of Ricardo Lopez, then, is a documentary, a condensed, 70 minute version of the 22 hours of footage that Lopez, sometimes better known as the “Bjork stalker,” filmed in his apartment in 1996. He recorded at least eleven two-hour “video diaries” of just himself talking to the camera. He started writing in a diary, then on his 21 st birthday bought himself a video camera. He worked as an exterminator, a job that frustrated him because he felt it was pointless and beneath him what Lopez really wanted was to be an artist, but because of fear of failure or being rejected, he dropped out of high school and never even bothered applying for art school.Īs he got older, these feelings manifested themselves into powerful mental issues, skewing reality for the young man. Ricardo Lopez was a real person, a twenty-one year old man (at the time of his death) who was born in Uruguay, then grew up in Georgia before settling in Florida. Chronicling the last days of the life of the social outcast Ricardo Lopez in 1996 as he mails a bomb to Icelandic singer Björk.
