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Whose Pride? Expanding Diversity in “Far From the Tree”


Photo: Participant Media

Photo: Participant Media

by Lauren Wissot

The premise behind Emmy Award-winning Rachel Dretzin’s Far From the Tree is both simple and profound. hellip; [T]he film challenges its audience to reexamine some fundamental assumptions about human traits which society deems “defects.” Instead offering the radical notion of celebrating those “flaws” rather than attempting to “fix” them.

Case in point is Solomon’s own experience as that of a closeted gay man during a time when homosexuality was still classified as a psychological problem. He observed that which was once considered the “illness of homosexuality” slowly morph over the years into what we now recognize as the “identity of gayness.” As a now happily married man with a husband and several kids, he began to wonder what other types of folks out there didn’t need to be “cured”? …

Dretzin’s film distills the spirit of Solomon’s near-thousand-page tome into a handful of families, with Solomon’s story serving as a through line. …

(To read the complete review, please visit Global Comment.)