A1 poster for The Visitor, a film by director, photographer, performer, writer and queer provocateur Bruce LaBruce.
Cast and produced in London by a/political, The Visitor is inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s classic film Teorema (1968). In Pasolini’s original, Terence Stamp plays a mysterious character only identified in the credits as “The Visitor.” The origin of this character is never explained, as he infiltrates an upper class Milanese family, gains their trust, and seduces them one by one – the frustrated mother, the alienated father, the delicate son, the innocent daughter, and the devoutly religious maid. LaBruce’s film takes the charged sexual content of the original text and makes it explicit, reversing the dominating rhetoric in politics and the press on the sexualized violence of refugees. The ‘alien’ instead becomes a sexual healer, a sensitive subject he has explored before through the trope of the Black male’s sexual potency as a threat to the ‘domesticated’ white bourgeois sexual repression.
Bruce LaBruce is a filmmaker, photographer, writer, and artist based in Toronto but working internationally. Along with a number of short films, he has written and directed 14 feature films, including Gerontophilia (2013), which won the Grand Prix at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal in 2013, and “Pierrot Lunaire,” which won a Teddy Award at the Berlinale in 2014. As a photographer he has had numerous gallery shows around the world, including a photo exhibit called Obscenity at La Fresh Gallery in Madrid which caused a national ruckus in Spain in 2012. His feature film L.A. Zombie (2010) premiered in competition at the Locarno film festival and was subsequently banned in Australia in 2010. His movie, Saint-Narcisse (2020), was named one of the top 10 films of 2021 by John Waters in Artforum. His porn feature, The Affairs of Lidia (2020), from Erika Lust Films, was released in 2022. LaBruce has contributed to a variety of international magazines, newspapers and websites as both a writer and photographer, including Index Magazine, for which he also acted as a contributing editor, Vice, The Guardian UK, Honcho, Purple Fashion, Numero, Dazed and Confused, Tank, BlackBook, Bon, Fantastic Man, Man About Town, Bomb, and many others. His photography books Death Book and Photo Ephemera (in two volumes) are available from Baron Books. LaBruce has had a number of notable film retrospectives, including one at the TIFF/Bell Lightbox under the auspices of the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014, one at MoMA in New York in 2015, and one at the la Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montreal in 2022.
Dimensions: A1 (594x841mm)
Printed Sides: Single Sided
Stock: 200gsm Matt
