Bruce LaBruce

Directing

Bruce LaBruce

Born January 3, 1964 · Tiverton, Ontario, Canada (age 62)

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. Mo…

Known For

The VisitorThe Visitor · 2024
The Visitor
★ 4.12024
MovieComedy
London, 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 Raspberry ReichThe Raspberry Reich · 2004
The Raspberry Reich
★ 5.62004
MovieDramaAction
Gudrun 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.
GerontophiliaGerontophilia · 2013
Gerontophilia
★ 6.02013
MovieRomanceComedy
Lake 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.
Otto; or, Up with Dead PeopleOtto; or, Up with Dead People · 2008
Otto; or, Up with Dead People
★ 5.32008
MovieDramaHorror
A young zombie named Otto appears on a remote highway. He has no idea where he came from or where he is going. After hitching a ride to Berlin and nesting in an abandoned amusement park, he begins to explore the city. Soon he is discovered by underground filmmaker Medea Yarn, who begins to make a documentary about him with the support of her girlfriend, Hella Bent, and her brother Adolf, who operates the camera. Meanwhile, Medea is still trying to finish Up with Dead People, the epic political-porno-zombie movie that she has been working on for years. She convinces its star, Fritz Fritze, to allow the vulnerable Otto to stay in his guest bedroom. When Otto discovers that he has a wallet that contains information about his past, before he was dead, he begins to remember details about his ex-boyfriend, Rudolf. He arranges to meet him at the schoolyard where they met, with devastating results.
Bowels of HellBowels of Hell · 2026
Bowels of Hell
★ 4.32026
MovieHorror
Malu 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.
The MisandristsThe Misandrists · 2017
The Misandrists
★ 3.42017
MovieDrama
In Ger(wo)many, when an army of radical females is preparing for a final revolution and a utopian world without men, a young male soldier arrives seeking refuge at the convent.
Saint-NarcisseSaint-Narcisse · 2021
Saint-Narcisse
★ 5.52021
MovieComedyDrama
Dominic’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.
Boy / GirlBoy / Girl · 1987
Boy / Girl
★ 5.51987
MovieDrama
In 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.

Filmography

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Otto; or, Up with Dead PeopleOtto; or, Up with Dead People · 2008
Otto; or, Up with Dead People
★ 5.32008
MovieDramaHorror
A young zombie named Otto appears on a remote highway. He has no idea where he came from or where he is going. After hitching a ride to Berlin and nesting in an abandoned amusement park, he begins to explore the city. Soon he is discovered by underground filmmaker Medea Yarn, who begins to make a documentary about him with the support of her girlfriend, Hella Bent, and her brother Adolf, who operates the camera. Meanwhile, Medea is still trying to finish Up with Dead People, the epic political-porno-zombie movie that she has been working on for years. She convinces its star, Fritz Fritze, to allow the vulnerable Otto to stay in his guest bedroom. When Otto discovers that he has a wallet that contains information about his past, before he was dead, he begins to remember details about his ex-boyfriend, Rudolf. He arranges to meet him at the schoolyard where they met, with devastating results.

Director

Ulrike's BrainUlrike's Brain · 2017
Ulrike's Brain
★ 2.02017
MovieScience FictionComedy
Referencing sixties B-movies like THEY SAVED HITLER’S BRAIN and THE BRAIN THAT WOULD NOT DIE, ULRIKE’S BRAIN finds Doctor Julia Feifer (Susanne Sachsse) arriving at an academic conference with an organ box. Inside the box: the brain of Ulrike Meinhof, which was saved by the authorities along with the brains of the three other leaders of the RAF after their deaths in Stammheim prison. Doctor Feifer can communicate telepathically with Ulrike’s brain, which is directing her to lead a new feminist revolution. To that end, she is searching for the ideal female body to transplant Ulrike’s brain into. At the same time, her arch-rival, Detlev Schlesinger, an extreme right-wing ideologue, arrives at the conference with the ashes of Michael Kühnen, the former German neo-Nazi leader and infamous homosexual who died of AIDS in 1989. When the two Frankenstein’s monsters of the extreme left and the extreme right meet, chaos ensues.

Director

Pierrot LunairePierrot Lunaire · 2014
Pierrot Lunaire
★ 5.32014
MovieMusicDrama
Invited 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!”

Director