Tiger Orange

Wade Gasque's film is set in a small town in inland California. Two brothers come back together after their father's death; both are gay and their lives are exact opposites. Chet stayed in the town, took over their father's hardware store, and learned to live by making himself invisible. Chet, the elder, runs the shop alone. Todd comes back from Los Angeles and moves in: tattooed, openly gay and hiding from nobody, which unsettles both the town and the balance Chet had built. The film quietly sets up a contest between them: which one lost more, the one who stayed or the one who went? What it means to be gay in that town is given not as an issue but as the texture of daily life. It is short, made on very little, and rests on its two actors.