Fair Haven

James has just come out of a programme. His family sent him to conversion therapy; the aim was that he give up being gay. Now he is coming home. His father runs an apple farm and wants him to work there. James plays the piano and had been thinking of applying to a conservatory; his father does not count that an option. His old friend Charlie is in the town. Something happened between them in the past. James is now seeing a girl and trying to persuade himself that it is right. Kerstin Karlhuber directs. Michael Grant plays James and Tom Wopat his father; Gregory Harrison and Jennifer Bini Taylor are in the cast. It is an American production. The matter it treats is conversion therapy; the film shows not its result but the damage it leaves in a person. The narrative does not show the father as one dimensional; the man has lost his wife and is putting his own loss on his son. The man who ran the therapy is inside the narrative too and his own past opens. The piano is a marker; James behaves as himself only there. It was made on a low budget and shown at festivals. The narrative offers no easy resolution and the distance between father and son does not close. Its limit is production; the acting is uneven, the script explanatory in places and the pace low. Who it is for: viewers who like independent family drama and narratives of identity. Who it is not for: the scale is small, the narrative conventional, and the subject heavy.