Commenced during lockdown and shot in the neighbourhoods the filmmaker grew up in, The Perpetrators collages moody analogue film, original animation and archival materials in a dreamy autofiction of queer darkness that ponders the correlations between 1980s Stranger Danger, the construction of homosexual identity and the institution of the family.

At a time when political leaders are once again escalating narratives of queer people being a threat to children, Squires’ timely reflection on his own 1980s childhood exposes the history of pathological representations of menacing queers.

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