A macho fetish camboy and a pedophile middle-school teacher walk into an Airbnb… in Elliot Tuttle’s sharp shock of an American indie, “Blue Film.” Reportedly shunned by festivals like Sundance and SXSW last year and ignored by distributors, this provocative chamber drama finally gets a theatrical release from a fledgling shingle, Obscured Releasing, this spring.
It’s a movie that I called “independent cinema” at its most provocative in my IndieWire review. And the folks at Obscured echoed that sentiment in their acquisition, saying in a statement when the film‘s sale was announced that Tuttle “is asking questions no American filmmaker has dared to ask in decades, and we’re thrilled to be launching ‘Blue Film’ in theaters.” Watch the film’s trailer below.
The logline explains that “the film follows fetish camboy Aaron Eagle (Kieron Moore), who agrees to spend the night with an anonymous client (Reed Birney) and discovers a disturbing tie to his past,” but that’s just the beginning of their twisty dynamic. It’s a breakout leading role for Moore, who also starred on Netflix’s series “Boots” among other TV projects, and here commands the screen alongside veteran actor Birney.
As Tuttle’s debut feature, “Blue Film” charts over one dark night of the soul how these two men’s sexual histories entwine to manifest decades of shame, repression, and hurt. Birney also produced the film and has spoken openly about how he didn’t expect a film he saw as a character study to become so controversial. According to reports, even the Frameline LGBTQ festival turned down “Blue Film.”
Earlier, I wrote, “Few contemporary films about unresolved childhood abuse — which is always unresolved, in the end, anyway — cut as narrowly close to the bone as Elliot Tuttle’s two-hander masked as provocation, ‘Blue Film.’ Rejected by mainstream film festivals before it premiered in Edinburgh this summer and NewFest in New York in October, this taboo-busting study of a masculine camboy confronted by the pedophile teacher who many years ago desired him holds back little and offers even less that’s palatable to swallow. Its limitations as a stagelike piece aside, the movie wrings emotional complexity from a fraught, ever-shifting dialogue between a convicted child abuser and the student, now a late twenties sex worker, he spared.”
The film was produced by Bijan Kazerooni, Will Youmans, Adam Kersh, and Waylon Sall, with Mark Duplass as consulting producer, and Birney and Eric Kohn as executive producers.
“Blue Film” opens in select theaters starting Friday, May 8. Check out the film’s first trailer below.