The Trailer For ‘Holding The Man’ Has Arrived
The Australian film, based on the seminal memoir by Timothy Conigrave, closed this year's Sydney Film Festival in a mess of tear-soaked tissues and sobs.
This year’s Sydney Film Festival ended with a tear-jerker: the world premiere of Neil Armfield’s Holding The Man, based on the best-selling, seminal memoir published a few months after the death of its writer, Timothy Conigrave, which later became a globally acclaimed theatre piece written by Tommy Murphy.
The film is a beautifully drawn adaptation of the play and book, with Murphy manning the screenplay once again: it charts the 15-year love affair between Connigrave (Ryan Corr) and John Calleo (Craig Stott), the captain of the football team at a Melbourne boys’ high school, who Tim met when they were teenagers in the 1970s. After close to a decade together — ten years complicated by Calleo’s homophobic father, and wider political battles for gay rights in Australia — the pair moved into a Sydney apartment together, before being diagnosed with AIDS in 1985.
The film opens around Australia on August 27. We reviewed it here. Bring tissues.