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Exclusive: Boutique distributor Juno Films has taken North American rights to Playland, a queer genre-bender marking the first feature from writer-director Georden West. On the heels of a festival run that saw it world premiere in Rotterdam before going on to play the Tribeca Festival and others, the film is slated for a theatrical release this spring, with a digital release for Pride Month to follow in June.

Playland conjures a time-bending night in Boston’s oldest and most notorious gay bar. Featuring an eclectic ensemble of queer performers, including drag icon Lady Bunny and Pose‘s Danielle Cooper, the transdisciplinary film sees music, dance, archival footage, tableaux, opera, and performance art layered into an ethereal piece subverting all boundaries. The work of queer fantasy and history takes place inside the empty husk of the Playland Café. Although the cafe shut down in the late ’90s, West stages one last...

The only exterior shot Playland shows of the iconic Boston gay dive that lends the film its name is a black-and-white photograph slotted seconds before the end credits. Established in 1937, the Playland was the city’s oldest gay bar and served as a crucial queer hub until 1998, when the owners surrendered to Boston’s “urban renewal” projects and the building turned to rubble. Never once does writer-director-editor Georden West beckon us outside its premises. From the minute the camera first glides across dust-covered tables to the monochrome pictures with which it closes, West’s feature debut reconstructs the dive and keeps us locked inside. It’s the night before demolition, and what unfurls is a kind of farewell ceremony as owner Lady (Danielle Cooper), decked head-to-toe in black leather, travels across sixty years of Playland’s history to conjure the ghosts of a few regulars for one final call. “A...

Queer history cannot escape its own evanescence. Neither can queer spaces, really. To judge by the conceit behind Georden West’s fabulous, if oblique, “Playland,” such ephemerality is precisely what makes such a history and such spaces so ripe for memorializing. In this case, West has turned his attention to the Playland Café which, over its storied tenure from 1937 to 1998, became a fixture of the Boston gay scene. Rather than narrativize the bar’s own story, West opts for a collage-like approach, conjuring up figures from the bar’s many pasts in intersecting vignettes that together capture the spirit of the Playland Café, both at its glory and now following its demise.

At the center of “Playland” is an interdisciplinary sensibility. West’s film builds itself out with the use of archival images, historical audio clips, choreographed numbers and glittering tableaux vivants. This is an excavated history that requires collapsing and colliding worlds and words.

Having its world premiere at the Intl. Film Festival Rotterdam, Georden West’s directorial debut “Playland” is an interdisciplinary film about the titular establishment, Boston’s oldest gay bar. “I was volunteering at an MIT event, like an archive hackathon, and I learned about People Before Highways, which was a grassroots movement against urban renewal and the construction of a highway through the middle of Boston, and they were successful,” says West of how they first came across the bones for the film. “I think it is a story of what happens when government intervention is very successful in a fringe subculture in erasing it. So I became quite impassioned, and that’s what led me initially to the archive to dig at the history project.”

Commenting on the ensemble-based format of the film, West says they were “interested in something that was polyphonic. Following a single protagonist through an...