The trailer of the upcoming film 1985 has dropped and we’re excited to see the final project.
1985, by director Yen Tan, follows a young man returning to his childhood home with the intention to say goodbye.
At the start of the film, main character Adrian has recently lost his lover to AIDS and is struggling with the disease himself. He then decides to visit his family in Texas before it’s too late.
There, he reconnects with is parents, his childhood friend Carly (played by Jamie Chung) and his younger brother, who might be gay himself, Andrew (played by Aidan Langford).
According to the Daily Beast, Tan based his film off of a 2016 short he made and he based that off of his experiences working at a viatical settlement firm. There, he witnesses many gay men living with HIV or AIDS.
As the Daily Beast wrote:
“By the nature of the job, men revealed details about the relationships they had—or more often, didn’t have—with their families. Often, Tan felt confused. Why would this gay man whom his family disowned still name his father as his beneficiary? And then there was one patient whose offhand comment stuck with him, two decades later, planting the seed from which 1985 eventually grew: ‘The saddest thing is when the family doesn’t know.’
“A lot of those things that happened at that job didn’t quite click until the last few years when I’m revisiting memories of it,” Tan tells The Daily Beast. “When I was coming out, it was an exciting thing for me to enter that world. But at the same time I was working at a job interacting with people who were coming to the end of their lives, making end-of-life arrangements. I think the things people were telling me back then, I understood it, but it didn’t quite hit me on an emotional level until I got older.”
But that's not all. Gotham star Cory Michael Smith will be staring in the lead role.
Plus, Smith came out as queer while promoting the film.
“There’s something special about telling a story that feels closer to home,” Smith, who identifies as queer, tells The Daily Beast. “I’m not exactly like The Riddler in real life.
“I’m from Middle America,” he says. “I’m from Ohio. I’ve been living here [in New York] for a while, and there are stretches when I don’t see my family often. Going home and that whole charade is very familiar. The first family dinner after a while. Coming out to a family, the fear of that.”
And how will Adrian handle his last visit with his family? We'll find out on October 26 when the film releases in the US. In the meantime, you can watch the trailer below:
h/t: The Daily Beast