It’s been two years since Andrew Durham’s debut feature film, FAIRYLAND, played at the Provincetown Film Festival and was the unanimous winner of the Audience Award. NOW Lionsgate and Willa are finally giving this extraordinary, wonderful movie a theatrical release, and we should tell you it is really worth the wait. The story is based on Fairyland: A Memoir Of My Father by Alysia Abbott. which was named one of the best books of 2013 by The San Francisco Chronicle.
After his wife dies in a car accident in 1973, gay writer and activist Steve Abbott (Scoot McNairy) moves with his two-year-old daughter to San Francisco. There, they discover a city bustling with queer men in search of liberation—few of whom are raising a child.
Steve throws himself into San Francisco’s vibrant cultural scene. He takes Alysia to parties, pushes her in front of the microphone at poetry readings, and introduces her to a world of artists, thinkers, and writers. But the pair live like nomads, moving from apartment to apartment, with a revolving cast of roommates and little structure. As a child Alysia views her father as a loving playmate but as she gets older Alysia wants more than anything to fit in. The world, she learns, is hostile to difference.
In her teens, Steve’s friends—several of whom she befriended—fall ill as “the gay plague” starts its rampage through their community. While Alysia (Emilia Jones) is studying in New York and then France, her father comes to tell her it’s time to come home; He’s sick with AIDS. She must choose, as her father once did, whether to take on the responsibility.
Back in 2023 , Queerguru was hardly the only one to give the film a rave review ( see HERE) we wrote at the time
Soon all lightness started to appear as the city was hit by the tornado of AIDS when everyone was in the dark about what was killing off previously healthy gay men. Then eventually as Steve is diagnosed with the disease, Durham so perceptively takes Fairyland to a whole different plane. His handling of what is now a heartbreaking scenario is exemplary and we don’t begrudge him the fact we are running out of Kleenex.
It is therefore no major surprise when we later read that like Alyssa, Durham had to leave College and go home to nurse his dying father. But how he found the strength to revisit that to film this scene I will never know. But then it is the sheer authenticity that makes Fairyland a total must-see for our entire community and a beautiful reminder of how we really need to live life to the full ….for ourselves and for those who were robbed of the opportunity.
We should mention that the movie was produced by Academy Award Winner Sofia Coppola who actully gave Durham the memoir in the first place, plus the film also stars Adam Lambert and Geena Davis . It will be playing in movie thesares on October 1Oth. DO NOT MISS IT
