{"id":360598,"date":"2026-04-02T17:25:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T17:25:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/360598\/"},"modified":"2026-04-02T17:25:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T17:25:11","slug":"provocative-drama-aims-to-shock-and-move-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/360598\/","title":{"rendered":"Provocative Drama Aims to Shock (and Move) You"},"content":{"rendered":"

A macho fetish camboy and a pedophile middle-school teacher walk into an Airbnb\u2026 in Elliot Tuttle\u2019s sharp shock of an American indie, \u201cBlue Film<\/a>.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a movie that I called \u201cindependent cinema\u201d<\/a> at its most provocative in my IndieWire review. And the folks at Obscured echoed that sentiment in their acquisition, saying in a statement<\/a> when the film<\/a>\u2018s sale was announced that Tuttle \u201cis asking questions no American filmmaker has dared to ask in decades, and we\u2019re thrilled to be launching \u2018Blue Film\u2019 in theaters.\u201d Watch the film\u2019s trailer below.<\/p>\n

\"Ally\"<\/a> \"Beef<\/a> <\/p>\n

The logline explains that \u201cthe 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,\u201d but that\u2019s just the beginning of their twisty dynamic. It\u2019s a breakout leading role for Moore, who also starred on Netflix\u2019s series \u201cBoots\u201d among other TV projects, and here commands the screen alongside veteran actor Birney.<\/p>\n

As Tuttle\u2019s debut feature, \u201cBlue Film\u201d charts over one dark night of the soul how these two men\u2019s sexual histories entwine to manifest decades of shame, repression, and hurt. Birney also produced the film and has spoken openly about how he didn\u2019t expect a film he saw as a character study to become so controversial. According to reports, even the Frameline LGBTQ<\/a> festival turned down \u201cBlue Film.\u201d<\/p>\n

Earlier, I wrote, \u201cFew contemporary films about unresolved childhood abuse \u2014 which is always unresolved, in the end, anyway \u2014 cut as narrowly close to the bone as Elliot Tuttle\u2019s two-hander masked as provocation, \u2018Blue Film.\u2019 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\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cBlue Film\u201d opens in select theaters starting Friday, May 8. Check out the film\u2019s first trailer below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A macho fetish camboy and a pedophile middle-school teacher walk into an Airbnb\u2026 in Elliot Tuttle\u2019s sharp shock…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360599,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[53645,156,593,409,111,139,69,28104],"class_list":{"0":"post-360598","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-blue-film","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-film","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-trailers"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360598\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}