After a long hiatus during the pandemic, the Trent Film Society has returned! We are pleased to once again bring you free films for your collective delectation.

Our first offering is Circus Boy, a short documentary film by Trent Film Society director and documentarian Lester Alfonso. Tom, a circus teacher, and his husband find themselves the adoptive co-parents of Ethan, an at-risk youth and talented young gymnast, along with Ethan’s birth family. The film follows this family in its new shape as they navigate introducing their son to Tom’s mother, who has some reservations. It is an intimate and refreshingly quotidian portrait of the ways in which families can be chosen and made.

For queer people, the concept of chosen family has long been a survival strategy and a source of refuge. By reaching out to each other, queer people build for themselves networks of love and support that might otherwise be unavailable. While the current popular image of the gay family is of two adoptive parents, the necessity of finding kinship outside of the nuclear family has historically resulted in a greater flexibility in the shape that queer families are able to take. In this film we find, in the tradition of queer family-making, two families choosing to be a family together.

Circus Boy shows the real, lived, everyday possibility of moving beyond the nuclear family, not as a source of drama and conflict, but as a source of love and connection. After all, it takes a village…

Circus Boy will be shown at Bagnani Hall on December 11th at 4pm, and will be followed by a Q&A session with the director. This event is free and open to the public.