A teenager decides to follow in the footsteps of their beauty pageant-winning mother, against the wishes of an angry stepfather. This play on the Cinderella story is the basis of a movie premiering at the Atlanta Film Festival, called “Pageant Material.” And here the part of Cinderella is played by Rodney, a young gay man who struggles to break out of his small town to get to Atlanta and enter a drag queen competition.
“I wanted to tell a story that spoke to me, as a queer man,” writer and director Jonothon Mitchell tells “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes. “I felt like, if I could have seen that on-screen, it would have spoke to me in a way that would have let me know that I’m seen, I’m heard, and I wanted to share that with the world.”
The Cinderella fairy tale is mostly closely mirrored in Rodney’s two step-brothers and his step-father Verne, an abusive and violent bigot.
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