Screening in the Vanguard section of this year’s TIFF is Canadian writer, filmmaker, photographer and provocateur Bruce LaBruce’s dramedy Gerontophilia – a word that refers to a person who has a sexual preference for the elderly.
In the film, an eighteen year old boy gets a summer job in a nursing home and develops a deep emotional attachment to an older man. Discovering that the old man, along with the other patients, is being over-medicated to make him easier to manage, the boy weans the old man off his medication and helps him escape, resulting in a road trip across the country.
Here’s TIFF’s description:
Queering the May-December courtship of Harold and Maude, iconic (L.A. Zombie) returns with this subversively tender tale of the intimate bond between a teenage nursing home attendant and a sexagenarian resident.
Pier-Gabriel Lajoie and Walter Borden star as the younger and older man.
Walter Borden is a veteran Black Canadian actor of both stage and screen. Stateside readers might remember him in fellow Black Canadian filmmaker Charles Officer’s critically-acclaimed feature film, Nurse.Fighter.Boy, which has been featured several times on this blog in the past, and is currently on home video, and recommended viewing.
In addition to being an actor, Borden is also a poet, playwright, teacher, and activist. In addition to film, television, and radio work. He is a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal and the African Nova Scotian Music Association (ANSMA) Music Heritage Award for his mentoring and promoting two generations of African Nova Scotian musical talent, as well as the Portia White Prize, an award given annually by the Nova Scotia Arts Council to a person who has made a significant contribution to arts and culture in Nova Scotia.
He’s also openly gay.
Katie Boland and Marie-Hélène Thibault round out the starring cast for Gerontophilia.
Not being immediately familiar with director Bruce LaBruce’s work, I looked him up, naturally, and, let’s just say, with an X-rated film or two and several adult films on his resume, this probably won’t be a film that you’d call boring.
TIFF attendees will be able to see it for themselves at TIFF next month.
No trailer yet, but here’s a clip from the film:
