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'Boy Erased' Comes to the Winter KCET Cinema Series on October 30

By Allison Gray
October 22, 2018
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Q&A immediately following with Garrard Conley, author of “Boy Erased: A Memoir”; Martha Conley, his mother; and director, writer, producer and co-star Joel Edgerton.

Based on the 2016 memoir of Garrard Conley, this true story recounts how a young man (Lucas Hedges) in a small Arkansas town struggles with his homosexuality and is forced by his father, a Baptist pastor (Russell Crowe), to attend a conversion-therapy group. His mother (Nicole Kidman) eventually realizes the program is wrong and fights to remove her son from it. 

The film is true to Conley's life story, and Edgerton made sure “Boy Erased” held nothing back when it came to the topic of gay conversion therapy. Hedges' certainly felt Edgerton's passion for bringing this story to the screen, affirming that the film is "a story that needs to be told right now, because people are dying, or taking their own lives because of these places."

Edgerton muses, “If we do our job with this movie, we have the chance to create a bigger discussion about something that needs awareness. Conversion therapy, in general, takes many different forms. It's in hundreds of different countries. There are many different iterations of it. Some of them are religious-based, some secular. Some of them combine psychotherapy. The one constant in all of this is that conversion therapy is incredibly harmful.”

The film screens at 7:00 p.m. at the ArcLight Cinemas in Sherman Oaks. Immediately following the screening, Pete Hammond, who can also be seen in KCET’s Must See Movies, will moderate a Q&A session with Garrard Conley, author of “Boy Erased: A Memoir”; Martha Conley, his mother; and director, writer, producer and co-star Joel Edgerton,

“Boy Erased” will be released in theaters on November 2 by Focus Features.

Deadline.com is the presenting sponsor for the winter season of the KCET Cinema Series, which runs October 23 through December 11. The winter series is sold out and there will not be walk-up admissions available for the screenings.                              

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