
Directing
Bruce LaBruce
Born 1964-01-03 · Tiverton, Ontario, Canada
Bruce LaBruce is an internationally acclaimed Canadian filmmaker, photographer, writer, and artist based in Toronto. Along with a number of short films, he has written and directed nine feature films, including Gerontophilia, which won the Grand Prix at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal in 2013, and Pierrot Lunaire, which won the Teddy Award Special Jury Prize at the Berlinale in 2014. Most recently, LaBruce has been honoured with film retrospectives at both TIFF/Bell Lightbox 2014, and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, 2015. The MoMA retrospective featured all nine of LaBruce’s features as well as a program of short films. All of the films have now become part of MoMA’s permanent film collection. His films explore themes of sexual and interpersonal transgression against cultural norms, frequently blending the artistic and production techniques of independent film with gay pornography.
Acting credits
5.3Over 30 filmmakers and friends of Strand Releasing have come together to honor the company’s indelible contribution to independent cinema over the past thirty years. The participating filmmakers have each created a short film for the project, all shot on iPhones.
30/30 Vision: Three Decades of Strand Releasing
2019
5.5Reminiscent of Sunset Boulevard, the action is transposed from the silver screen's old backlots to contemporary male prostitution and the pornographic industry.
Hustler White
1996
6.5Living somewhere in present-day Quebec, Boris Malinowski has achieved all his goals. A freethinker, open-minded and proud, he also displays a certain arrogance when it comes to his successes. For some time now, his wife Béatrice, a Canadian government minister, has been bedridden, suffering from a mysterious depression. To escape from his wife’s agony, Boris begins a relationship with a colleague, Helga, and gets close to Klara, a young woman who works as a maid in Boris’s home. The sudden appearance of a stranger in his life forces Boris to come face-to-face with the world, with everything he takes for granted, with all his certainties.
Boris Without Beatrice
2016
4.3Malu is organising a gender-reveal party for a pregnant influencer – while dealing with her own grief, her persistent constipation problems and her adolescent transgender child (who disapproves of her job commission). At the condominium where Malu lives, some strange phenomena are unleashed in the home’s most private zone: the bathroom.
Bowels of Hell
2026
NRAn Italo-American teenaged girl in Michigan, with a Catholic family, becomes pregnant. To avoid both a scandal and an abortion, she secretly gives birth to a boy in hospital, which is run by nuns. They establish a false identity for him and arrange to have him brought up in Argentina. At the age of 18, the boy discovers that his biological mother is Madonna Ciccone, who, after giving him up, became the iconic international pop-culture mega-star.
The Material Boy
2015
Deep dark sick folk on their way down to the bottom.
Way Down
2005
5.5In LaBruce’s first short experimental super 8 film, a loose narrative is constructed out of a variety of film clips, some shot on location by the filmmaker, some found footage, and some shot off the television screen. A woman with long red hair (G.B. Jones) sits on a window sill and looks down with her binoculars at the street below. Meanwhile, Mary Tyler Moore escapes from an aggressive man and runs to the park. Boy/Girl is a documentation of a period of time when filmmaker LaBruce lived in a crummy, squat-like building at Queen and Parliament Streets in Toronto with the all-girl punk band, Fifth Column.
Boy / Girl
1987
1.0An exploration of twenty artists and their bodies of work.
Gaze
2010
6.6A lonely hairdresser watches the title sequence of "That Cold Day in the Park" then visits a local park to invite a down-and-out skinhead to his apartment. He draws the silent man a bath and talks to him as he soaks. He locks his guest in a bedroom. Next day, the skinhead leaves through the window and visits his sister, who's making a film called "Sisters of the SLA." He helps with a screen-test. The hairdresser has dreams and fantasies involving the skinhead, the skinhead returns to visit him, and then the filmmaker pays a call on the two men, exposing her brother as faking his silence and pretending a lack of sexual interest. Fantasies can come true.
No Skin Off My Ass
1991
7.2Documentary on the making of Gus Van Sant's "Psycho." Featured at the Berlin Film Festival, 2000.
Psycho Path
1999
7.0The lives of four down-on-their-luck characters. Surrounded by the vestiges of conspicuous consumption, they struggle to survive outside of society, fashioning their own aesthetics of poverty and devising strategies to navigate a surveillance society, evading or performing for cameras everywhere.
The Troublemakers
1990
6.0A journey through Swedish queer film history.
Prejudice and Pride: Swedish Film Queer
2022
6.0A down-on-his-luck adult film star sees a chance to make a comeback via a lesbian documentary film-maker, but she is exploiting him to get financial backing for her pet project.
Super 8½
1994
6.0The Advocate for Fagdom unites the puzzle pieces one by one. Testimonies are combined with rare archive images. Art galeries present movie extracts that are succeeded by images shot on location. And the other way round. Writers, film makers, art galeries owners, actors and actresses, photographers, producers, friends and loved ones all join in a game of interpretation, analysis or simple anecdotes. John Waters, Bruce Benderson, Harmony Korine, Gus Van Sant, Richard Kern, Rick Castro and others deliver their impressions, theories and confessions. Everything blends into the fascinating portrait of a singular person blessed with singular talents. A complex personality at war not with a system but all systems. The portrait of a man constantly moving between his punk attitude and extreme sensibility.
The Advocate for Fagdom
2011
The second installment of Australian maverick filmmaker Richard Wolstencroft's adaptation of the poem by W.B. Yeats continues to delve into the underbelly of occultism, physics, and political paranoia, as it travels over multiple continents, and across the lives of an eclectic group of characters, none of whom will remain unscathed from the impending apocalypse... and some of whom work to hasten the arrival of the chaos...
The Second Coming: Volume 2
2016
7.0A documentary on Queercore, the cultural and social movement that began as an offshoot of punk and was distinguished by its discontent with society's disapproval of the gay, bisexual, lesbian and transgender communities.
Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution
2017
2.9Amid girl fights, girl on girl sex and boy on boy sex, and a measure of BDSM, the YoYo gang battles the Skateboard Bitches.
The Yo-Yo Gang
1992
3.7In this Canadian Candide update, orphan Gordie (Jamie Shannon) lives with his hippie aunts at a quiet Porridge Glenn farm. When his beagle Speedoh is lost, a call from a psychic suggests a search in Toronto, where hayseed meets hooker wannabe Heidi (Sarain Boylan). She introduces him to two past-porn performers (Shelly Mars, Scott Thompson), the former stars of "Who's Afraid of Vagina Woolf?" Hick Gordie seems destined for street hustling and boogie nights after encountering a gay band that raises AIDS-research money by selling Gordie off to a sleazeball pimp (Alex Karzis). At this juncture, however, Heidi hatches a plan to reunite Gordie and Speedoh.
Hayseed
1997
4.6Discover the New York underground scene during the 80s and throw yourself into an exciting, anarchic and repulsive world that you won't forget.
Llik Your Idols
2007
5.3Invited by the conductor Premil Petrovic to stage Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, a musical theater work from 1912 based on the poems of Albert Giraud, LaBruce transposed a strange and tragic episode of true crime onto the composition. Complementing the original atonal score is a narrative about a trans man who is outed by his girlfriend’s father and forbidden from seeing the young woman again. Crestfallen, the protagonist decides to prove the fact of his manhood by castrating a taxi driver and then revealing his newly transplanted member to the two of them. This story, which for LaBruce “serves as a kind of allegory for all gender radicals and outcasts driven to extremes by the disapproval and hostility of the dominant order,” is rendered in a visual style that nods to the era of Schoenberg’s melodrama. LaBruce cheekily appropriates the formal vocabulary of silent cinema with black-and-white photography, irises, and intertitles like “A cock, a cock, my kingdom for a cock!”
Pierrot Lunaire
2014
NRFonda LaBruce and Vaginal Davis are a drag queen lesbian couple experiencing bed death. They call in therapist (Dr. Chris Teen) to help them get out of their sexual rut.
Dr. Chris Teen Sex Surrogate
1994
A hip and savvy look at sex, sexuality, gender and pop culture.
The Blue Hermaphrodite
—
Curmudgeon. Contrarian. Misanthrope. Naysayer. For all the people interviewed in this film, someone has used one of the above words to describe them. What have they done to deserve such labels? Everywhere these men and women go, something is being celebrated; they don’t get what all the celebration is about and they’re compelled to question it.
I, Curmudgeon
2004
2.0Go deep inside one of the most recognizable gay porn stars of all time. This exciting doc takes you behind-the-scenes to get a glimpse at the real life of François Sagat.
Sagat
2011
Behind the camera
5.3Over 30 filmmakers and friends of Strand Releasing have come together to honor the company’s indelible contribution to independent cinema over the past thirty years. The participating filmmakers have each created a short film for the project, all shot on iPhones.
30/30 Vision: Three Decades of Strand Releasing
2019
An enigmatic, fluid actor embodies a mythical figure tied to Virgil's egg, blurring reality and fiction as he recreates a film about his own life, an homage to Patroni Griffi's Il Mare. Through encounters, passions, and visions evoking ancient cults and legends, the work becomes a sensual, unsettling tribute to Naples and its magical-literary heritage.
Egg
2026
An enigmatic, fluid actor embodies a mythical figure tied to Virgil's egg, blurring reality and fiction as he recreates a film about his own life, an homage to Patroni Griffi's Il Mare. Through encounters, passions, and visions evoking ancient cults and legends, the work becomes a sensual, unsettling tribute to Naples and its magical-literary heritage.
Egg
2026
4.4London, today. A refugee washes up naked in a suitcase on the bank of the Thames. The enigmatic, sexually fluid stranger introduces himself to a bourgeois, upper-class family, who invite him to stay on as an employee. The Visitor soon seduces each member in a series of explicit sexual encounters. He will turn their world upside down as they can redefine themselves in new, radical ways.
The Visitor
2024
4.4London, today. A refugee washes up naked in a suitcase on the bank of the Thames. The enigmatic, sexually fluid stranger introduces himself to a bourgeois, upper-class family, who invite him to stay on as an employee. The Visitor soon seduces each member in a series of explicit sexual encounters. He will turn their world upside down as they can redefine themselves in new, radical ways.
The Visitor
2024
5.5Reminiscent of Sunset Boulevard, the action is transposed from the silver screen's old backlots to contemporary male prostitution and the pornographic industry.
Hustler White
1996
5.5Reminiscent of Sunset Boulevard, the action is transposed from the silver screen's old backlots to contemporary male prostitution and the pornographic industry.
Hustler White
1996
5.5Reminiscent of Sunset Boulevard, the action is transposed from the silver screen's old backlots to contemporary male prostitution and the pornographic industry.
Hustler White
1996
NRSometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but not in this case.
Défense de fumer
2014
NRSometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but not in this case.
Défense de fumer
2014
NRSometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but not in this case.
Défense de fumer
2014
Two celebrities (Gaspar Noe and Harmony Korine) meet for the first time to spend an evening in each others and the camera’s company.
Into the Night With Harmony Korine and Gaspar Noe
2010
5.6Gudrun has modeled her amateur German terrorist group after the 1970s Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof Gang). She attempts to imitate her heroes by kidnapping the son of a wealthy industrialist and hopes to negotiate leftist demands from the father. When Gudrun’s not spouting leftist verses (including during a hilariously brilliant fuck session), she’s trying to convince her all-male gang to abandon their heterosexuality, which she believes is the result of mass delusion.
The Raspberry Reich
2004
5.6Gudrun has modeled her amateur German terrorist group after the 1970s Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof Gang). She attempts to imitate her heroes by kidnapping the son of a wealthy industrialist and hopes to negotiate leftist demands from the father. When Gudrun’s not spouting leftist verses (including during a hilariously brilliant fuck session), she’s trying to convince her all-male gang to abandon their heterosexuality, which she believes is the result of mass delusion.
The Raspberry Reich
2004
5.5In LaBruce’s first short experimental super 8 film, a loose narrative is constructed out of a variety of film clips, some shot on location by the filmmaker, some found footage, and some shot off the television screen. A woman with long red hair (G.B. Jones) sits on a window sill and looks down with her binoculars at the street below. Meanwhile, Mary Tyler Moore escapes from an aggressive man and runs to the park. Boy/Girl is a documentation of a period of time when filmmaker LaBruce lived in a crummy, squat-like building at Queen and Parliament Streets in Toronto with the all-girl punk band, Fifth Column.
Boy / Girl
1987
5.5In LaBruce’s first short experimental super 8 film, a loose narrative is constructed out of a variety of film clips, some shot on location by the filmmaker, some found footage, and some shot off the television screen. A woman with long red hair (G.B. Jones) sits on a window sill and looks down with her binoculars at the street below. Meanwhile, Mary Tyler Moore escapes from an aggressive man and runs to the park. Boy/Girl is a documentation of a period of time when filmmaker LaBruce lived in a crummy, squat-like building at Queen and Parliament Streets in Toronto with the all-girl punk band, Fifth Column.
Boy / Girl
1987
6.6A lonely hairdresser watches the title sequence of "That Cold Day in the Park" then visits a local park to invite a down-and-out skinhead to his apartment. He draws the silent man a bath and talks to him as he soaks. He locks his guest in a bedroom. Next day, the skinhead leaves through the window and visits his sister, who's making a film called "Sisters of the SLA." He helps with a screen-test. The hairdresser has dreams and fantasies involving the skinhead, the skinhead returns to visit him, and then the filmmaker pays a call on the two men, exposing her brother as faking his silence and pretending a lack of sexual interest. Fantasies can come true.
No Skin Off My Ass
1991
6.6A lonely hairdresser watches the title sequence of "That Cold Day in the Park" then visits a local park to invite a down-and-out skinhead to his apartment. He draws the silent man a bath and talks to him as he soaks. He locks his guest in a bedroom. Next day, the skinhead leaves through the window and visits his sister, who's making a film called "Sisters of the SLA." He helps with a screen-test. The hairdresser has dreams and fantasies involving the skinhead, the skinhead returns to visit him, and then the filmmaker pays a call on the two men, exposing her brother as faking his silence and pretending a lack of sexual interest. Fantasies can come true.
No Skin Off My Ass
1991
Set in a not-so-distant future, it follows two iconic aging actresses who reunite on a film shoot that mirrors and reignites their decaying romance. Source: https://variety.com/2026/film/global/alliance-4-development-bruce-labruce-monica-bellucci-1236828965/
Third Take
—
Set in a not-so-distant future, it follows two iconic aging actresses who reunite on a film shoot that mirrors and reignites their decaying romance. Source: https://variety.com/2026/film/global/alliance-4-development-bruce-labruce-monica-bellucci-1236828965/
Third Take
—
5.6Dominic’s fetish is… himself. Nothing turns him on more than his own reflection. That’s why discovering that he has a twin brother, raised in a remote monastery by a depraved priest, causes him major consternation. Fate brings the two young men back together again, and their fraternal relationship is torn between sex, revenge and redemption.
Saint-Narcisse
2021
5.6Dominic’s fetish is… himself. Nothing turns him on more than his own reflection. That’s why discovering that he has a twin brother, raised in a remote monastery by a depraved priest, causes him major consternation. Fate brings the two young men back together again, and their fraternal relationship is torn between sex, revenge and redemption.
Saint-Narcisse
2021
6.0Lake is in a straight relationship with Desiree but finds himself becoming attracted to men at the pool. When he cannot control his desires any longer, he starts working at an adult home and begins a relationship with a much, much older man.
Gerontophilia
2013
6.0Lake is in a straight relationship with Desiree but finds himself becoming attracted to men at the pool. When he cannot control his desires any longer, he starts working at an adult home and begins a relationship with a much, much older man.
Gerontophilia
2013