Told from the perspective of a young girl raised by her single gay father to be a woman who is “strong and tolerant and not afraid of this world,” Fairyland reveals the intensely personal nature of its origins in Alysia Abbott’s 2013 memoir at every step of the characters’ complicated evolution together. Like that sometimes strained relationship, this debut feature from photographer Andrew Durham often feels stuck, but eventually reaches its destination with clear-eyed compassion and an emotionally powerful reconciliation. Those qualities are captured with enormous sensitivity in the lead performances of Emilia Jones and Scoot McNairy.
With a producing team led by Sofia Coppola for American Zoetrope, this is a bittersweet drama about unconventional parenting and alternative families that will resonate loudest with LGBTQ audiences. But its surge of final-act feeling will speak to any audience that has ever experienced the startling reckoning that comes with grief.
The film...
With a producing team led by Sofia Coppola for American Zoetrope, this is a bittersweet drama about unconventional parenting and alternative families that will resonate loudest with LGBTQ audiences. But its surge of final-act feeling will speak to any audience that has ever experienced the startling reckoning that comes with grief.
The film...
- 1/27/2023
- by David Rooney
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Stories about the gay heyday of 1970s San Francisco — and the cruel chaser of the AIDS crisis the following decade — often hang on the notion of chosen family within the queer community: the bonds formed when blood ties are severed by prejudice. Studies of biological family, and parenthood especially, in that context are more unusual, which is what makes Alysia Abbott’s book “Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father” so moving. An account of her upbringing by a gay single father amid the LGBTQ liberation movement, and her subsequent nursing of him through AIDS, it balances an eager child’s-eye acceptance of counterculture living with an older woman’s melancholy over things unsaid or misspoken. In “Fairyland,” Andrew Durham adapts her story with warmth and sensitivity, though those perspectives are more fluently bridged on the page than on the screen.
A photographer making his feature-length debut as writer-director, Durham initially...
A photographer making his feature-length debut as writer-director, Durham initially...
- 1/21/2023
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
Scoot McNairy is going to break your heart in Andrew Durham’s debut feature “Fairyland,” produced by Sofia Coppola and adapted from Alysia Abbott’s “Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father.” McNairy stars as Steve Abbott, a writer and widower who packs up his battered red Volkswagen bug and moves his young daughter Alysia (Nessa Dougherty) to San Francisco in the 1970s after the tragic death of his wife in a car accident.
In San Francisco, Steve can pursue his writing career and a queer lifestyle, all while providing Alysia with a free-wheeling, bohemian and highly independent childhood, one that is creative, honest and lived without shame, in a setting that’s more glam-rock than Summer of Love. However, like most kids and young adults, it will take years for Alysia to come to terms with the unique benefits of growing up in such an unconventional manner.
Durham takes care...
In San Francisco, Steve can pursue his writing career and a queer lifestyle, all while providing Alysia with a free-wheeling, bohemian and highly independent childhood, one that is creative, honest and lived without shame, in a setting that’s more glam-rock than Summer of Love. However, like most kids and young adults, it will take years for Alysia to come to terms with the unique benefits of growing up in such an unconventional manner.
Durham takes care...
- 1/21/2023
- by Katie Walsh
- The Wrap
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