André is an Idiot
(2025 | USA | 88 minutes | Tony Benna)

André is an Idiot opens with one of the most embarrassing and physically unsettling personal recollections from adolescence that I can remember seeing described or depicted on film. It’s a squirm-worthy story of adolescence, told straight to camera that tells you right from the jump that you’re settling in for a documentary of incredible candor.

The title refers to San Francisco advertising executive André Ricciardi and indeed the idiocy of the film surpasses that of the opening story of teenage self-pleasure turned horrifically painful. Adult André’s greatest blunder in life, by far, turns out to have been brushing off scheduling a colonoscopy to coincide with his 50th birthday. He really had no excuse beside complacency and avoiding discomfort given that his longtime best friend suggested they coordinate and do theirs together. A kind of middle-aged spa day, except with far more excrement and sedatives. For him, the consequence of a mere eighteen-month delay in emptying his intestines and allowing them to be surveyed is that by the time his body made the illness known and his colon cancer was detected, it’s already stage four, almost certainly terminal.

A lifelong creative and screwball, he turns this dire diagnosis into a headlong life-affirming irreverent documentary, in which he shows his version of facing cancer on his own terms. Through flashbacks and interviews, we get to know the shape of his personal history, success in the advertising business, and the dimensions of his beloved family. We also witness, first-hand, the specifics of his journey through the medical system to attempt to keep his illness at bay. The prognosis is grim, but like its subject, whose instincts for perpetual humor serve as a self-defense mechanism for himself and the people around him, the film refuses to wallow. Instead, it is a surprisingly funny, clear eyed, and movingly personal view of living the last years of one’s life on one’s own terms, even in the face of the ultimate unbeatability of death.

Get your damn colonoscopy!

André is an Idiot played as an official selection of the US Documentary Competition at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is available for online viewing from January 30-February 2.