Filmmaker
My name is Chris Vizzini
I'm a filmmaker and a designer. For most of my life the design was the only part I let people see, the SCAD training, the studio, the work I made for everyone but myself.
The Bad Brother is the first time I've turned my own work on my own life.
My Story
Everyone has a story. Sometimes the story is forced into the shadow of silence. I lived that way for decades and now is the time to speak up, not only for myself but for everyone out there who feels small and voiceless.
My abuse started at five at the hands of my older brother, the bad brother, and ended at 13, sort of. The abuse was sexual alongside a kind of abuse that took me far longer to understand. My mother walked in on him abusing me, did nothing then receded into the darkness.
At 17, I told my mom what she already knew. I told her he'd abused me. She hugged me then took me by the shoulders and said, "We can tell your other brothers and destroy the family, or you can keep quiet." The choiceless choice.
That was the moment I learned that I was worth nothing. Not worth protecting, not worth love, not worth existing and I spent the next decades trying to self-destruct out of a self-loathing that I hadn't a clue lived inside.
The dark years were filled with drinking, drugs, and treating my body as the dirt their silence imposed, the lie I came to believe. When that didn't work, I tried to step away from being alive.
But I was wrong. They were wrong. I was never worth nothing, and it took a hell of a journey to find that out.
This is the story of that journey.