Synopsis

After the death of their father, four siblings discover the truth of the first love he never shared with them. Taking place in the present day and in the 1980s, two generations of queer youth are finally able to connect in love and mourning.

Director Biography – Logan Thomason

Logan Thomason began his career as an actor, attending NYU Tisch School of the Arts at 16 and graduating at 19, where he left with a fervor for telling the stories of queer youth like the ones he grew up with. Logan’s own queer family history has informed a great deal of his work, like his directorial debut Royalty (2020), which was nominated for the Emerging Filmmaker Award at the Cannes Film Festival’s American Pavilion.

August (2023), is a narrative short that tells the story of four siblings who, after the death of their father, discover the truth of the first love he never shared with them.

Director Statement

I wrote August after the passing of my grandmother, when I learned that conversations between generations about queerness had become something of an accidental tradition. A queer bloodline runs straight through my family, but the circumstance and reaction to that fact has changed radically in a short timespan. Where I could have frank, nonjudgmental conversations with my two mothers about crushes on boys or girls from a young age, my grandfather never could. In that way, August is a sort of fictional love letter from one generation to another, imagining that as our protagonist finally allows herself to grieve, she might also find a kinship in the queerness her father never told her about while he was alive.

Directing August presented a unique challenge: shooting a 20-page script over the course of short shooting blocks with teenagers in the cold, rainy mountains undergoing a flood warning would not have been an ideal set of circumstances for any shoot. But thanks to rigorous planning and flexibility on the part of our Director of Photography, we were able to use the rain to our advantage, creating a sense of atmosphere that helped us to differentiate between time periods in a natural way, allowing the audience to pinpoint a separation in perspective without holding their hand. I’m proud to have worked with young actors that were so hungry to be challenged, and I look forward to sparking hard conversations with accessible touchstones that help to normalize queer experiences.