House of Boys opens its doors

by Boyd van Hoeij

04/12/2008 - Filming will start on December 17 on the ambitious €2m Luxembourg production House of Boys, an English-language film that tackles AIDS in the 1980s. Jean-Claude Schlim, who has long been active behind the scenes in the Luxembourg film industry, will make his directorial debut on the film.

The screenplay was written by the director in collaboration with Christian Thiry and with additional input from Bob Graham and US cult writer J.T.Leroy.

House of Boys is set in 1984, when 18-year-old school dropout Frank, freshly out of the closet, travels to Amsterdam and ends up working in a gay cabaret run by Madame. He falls in love with an apparently heterosexual colleague from the US, Jake, who has come down with a mysterious illness that is soon diagnosed as “the gay cancer”.

British model-turned-actor Layke Anderson (X-Men 2, Closing the Ring) headlines an eclectic cast that also includes Stephen Fry , Eleanor David and Udo Kier in the role of Madame.

The director says that his impetus to make the film stems from the fact that “cinema has long since forgotten about AIDS. House of Boys will be a time document so that new generations can visualise the horrors and thus hopefully become aware of the problem”.

The film will shoot for four days this month, with a further 19 days planned in January. It is a co-production of Delux Productions/ Elsani Film and Red Lion, with the backing of Luxembourg Film Fund, the Luxembourg Ministry of Culture, the Luxembourg Public Health Ministry and a host of European AIDS charities and initiatives.