An examination of family deterioration and redemption, the piece uses twenty-year-old home movie footage, recreated shot-for-shot in the present day, and employs the life of Belgian action star Jean-Claude Van Damme as a means to tell its bittersweet story.

is a brilliant piece of 21st-century art, an elegant mash-up of pop culture and the intensely personal, of live performance and the moving image, of memento mori and joie de vivre, the death wish and the creative impulse.

[5] On Mr. Van Damme's 53rd birthday in October 2013, Oberzan's theater/film/musical, Tell Me Love Is Real, premiered at the International Arts Campus deSingel in Belgium, followed by a world tour.

Having bizarrely overdosed on the anxiety drug Xanax at approximately the same time and under similar circumstances as Whitney Houston, Oberzan leans on the personages of Amelia Earhart, Serge Gainsbourg, Bruce Lee, Buddy Holly, Leonard Cohen, and a host of others to examine, through pop culture, timeless existential quandaries.

Tages Anzeiger writes: “'Tell Me Love Is Real' is a highly aesthetisized autobiography and deeply moving collage of film clips, live performance, and songs.

[8] Meticulously adapting his favorite novel First Blood, Oberzan, as a metaphor representative of Rambo's own alienated and deeply frustrated struggle, shot, designed, edited, and portrayed all 26 characters by himself (including hunting dogs) in his minuscule 220-square-foot (20 m2) Manhattan studio apartment, with a total budget of $95.51.

"[10] Pulitzer-prize nominated critic Matt Zoller Seitz released a video essay contrasting the film with the better-known Sylvester Stallone version.

[11] The New School Professor and Fulbright winner Carol Wilder devoted a chapter of her 2013 book Crossing the Street in Hanoi to Flooding with Love for The Kid.

Slant Magazine writes: "...A surprisingly sophisticated meditation on the specificity of cinematic representation and the impossibility of successfully reclaiming the past, as well as a secondhand character study as exhaustive and authentic as any in recent memory.

[2] Marilyn Stasio of Variety wrote: "Watching Oberzan (on screen and in person) express his thoughts and damned-up feelings is funny as hell.