Educational Media Reviews Online

Winner of the 2015 Southwest Gay and Lesbian Film Festival Best Documentary Award, the film highlights a diverse Boston youth troupe, “True Colors” to provide an LGBQT learning environment through performance arts. With personable stories transitioned into prompts for their plays, the cast brings to life fresh perspectives of acceptance, cultural issues, gender expression, and sexual identity.

This insightful feature-length documentary goes behind the scenes as a group of LGBTQ youth create, inspire, write, rehearse, and perform scenes for an upcoming play about queer, and universal love. Based in Boston, the True Colors: OUT Youth Theater provides a safe-haven for young adults to disclose stories about acceptance, coming out, self-doubt, self-hatred, self-identity, first love, homosexuality within the Church and Haitian culture, and, unfortunately, being ostracized from parents, home, and friends.

What’s refreshing about this film is that the story is told from the perspective of today’s LGBTQ youth. Brodsky provides a video diary of 15 youth, ages 14-22, over eight months leading up to opening night performance. During this time, members of the acting troupe are able to self-heal through therapy and self-analysis to express and release their anxieties, fears, and uncertainties into emotional and heart-wrenching scripts used to educate K-12, college and universities, and various social work programs.

After the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, several members of the cast, while heart broken, come together to find solace and a newfound determination of bringing safe conversations and learning opportunities to a vast majority. A year later, the cast of True Colors is comprised of old and new members with new stories to share.

This film is highly recommended for school, public and academic libraries.