Reel Pride Film Festival

Tower Theatre :: 8:00pm :: Sunday, September 20

Edie and Thea: A Very Long Engagement

  • $15.00
    • online closed. tickets available at box office
  • Directors: Gréta Olafsdóttir and Susan Muska
  • 2009, USA, 67min

Two women sit watching a slideshow of their life together and remember the night they met and how they danced together for hours. “We danced so long, I wore a hole in my stocking,” says Edie. So begins ‘Edie & Thea: A Very Long Engagement’, a tender double portrait of two elderly women whose shared life is both ordinary — filled with trips, work and milestones like getting engaged and buying their first home — and extraordinary. Extraordinary because Edie and Thea met in the closeted early sixties, and their lives unfolded against a backdrop of radical cultural change.

Like any classic romance, there’s a wedding at the end, as Edie and Thea, who is now in a wheelchair due to MS, fly to Canada to bring their Very Long Engagement to its proper conclusion.
— Monica Nolan, Frameline

Directed by Gréta Olafsdóttir and Susan Muska (The Brandon Teena Story) the film draws on a wealth of photographs from infancy to adulthood to create a mosaic of the two women’s lives, while Edie and Thea reminisce, painting a kaleidoscopic picture of pre-Stonewall gay life: the bars and the parties, as well as estranged families and the constant fear of exposure.

The directors and cast members will be in attendance.