Cameron Post looks the part of a perfect high school girl. But after she’s caught with another girl in the back seat of a car on prom night, Cameron is quickly shipped off to a conversion therapy center that treats teens “struggling with same-sex attraction.” At the facility, Cameron is subjected to outlandish discipline, dubious “de-gaying” methods, and earnest Christian rock songs—but this unusual setting also provides her with an unlikely gay community. For the first time, Cameron connects with peers, and she’s able to find her place among fellow outcasts.

Writer/director Desiree Akhavan (Appropriate Behavior) and co-writer Cecilia Frugiuele sensitively adapt Emily Danforth’s acclaimed eponymous coming-of-age novel and create a refreshingly original teen movie. Balancing out inherent drama with understated humor, The Miseducation of Cameron Post looks at a teenage girl grappling with pain and loss, but at the same time, she is creating a family on her own terms and learning what it means to empower herself by having confidence in her own identity. 

AWARDS  

2018 | Grand Jury Prize, Sundance Film Festival

2018 | Nominee Best Film, Sydney Film Festival

2018 | Nominee, Best LGBTQ Film, Molodist Film Festival 

Emily M. Danforth's debut coming-of-age novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post,won the 2012 Montana Book Award, two High Plains book awards, and was a finalist for the American Library Association's William C. Morris Award and a Lambda Literary Award. It has since been translated into numerous languages and editions. In 2018, filmmaker Desiree Akhavan’s feature film adaptation of The Miseducation of Cameron Post won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance International Film Festival. The film has helped to inspire anti-conversion therapy legislation throughout the United States. the film.

“I’m so incredibly thrilled to be coming to the Side by Side Festival in Russia to talk about the film adaptation of my novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Desiree Akhavan's film feels true to so many touchstone moments of queer adolescence--both of 30 years ago, with the story is set, but also of today. This is the funny and heartbreaking film about staying true to oneself and finding a queer community that would have meant the world to me as a closeted teen in "cowboy country" Montana of the early 1990s. Cameron Post, the title character, is herself a kind of ravenous connoisseur of lesbian media--the few examples she can find during those pre-internet days in a rural place. She spends many obsessive hours "queering" the big budget Hollywood movies she rents on VHS or sees in her small town theatre. Queer representation has always, since the earliest days of motion pictures, been so crucial to our understanding of who we are and who we might be, and also who we refuse to be--for better or worse and everything in between. I'm so grateful that Cameron Post has now become a part of that rich cinematic history.”

PRESENTER: ULIYANA PETRUKHINA - Blogger