Program for LGBT Health: Film Screening - PRODIGAL SONS

PRODIGAL SONS is a powerful & dramatic chronicle of Reed's extraordinary life journey from her origins in Helena, Montana in the body & persona of Paul McKerrow: All-American Boy.

Star quarterback of his high-school football team, class president, ­valedictorian voted "most likely to succeed" by classmates - and now a New York-based rising star on the independent film circuit - Reed set out to document her apprehensive 2005 return to Helena for the school's 20-year reunion.

"At the film’s core, however, is the loving but long-combative relationship between [her adopted brother] Marc and Ms. Reed," says Jeannette Catsoulis in the NY Times Critic's Choice review, "a connection that ties both to a past that neither recalls with fondness. Seriously brain-damaged in a car accident, Marc suffers from seizures and terrifying mood swings (in one particularly painful scene, he brutally attacks the sexual choices of his sister and their gay brother, Todd), but Ms. Reed and her cinematographer, John Keitel, never sensationalize. Maintaining a simple, naturalistic style, they patiently capture the shifting dynamics of a family hanging in without giving out. A tale of two siblings — one basking in memories, the other fleeing them — 'Prodigal Sons' grapples with identity through the prism of sibling rivalry. In the end its conclusions have little to do with gender and everything to do with acceptance."

http://www.prodigalsonsfilm.com/