Christopher Grigat | Confessions / 2014

i’m writing a letter to daddy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christopher Grigat (screenwriter and director) Confessions / 2014 [6 minutes]

 

Confessions is one of those films, again without dialogue, that is supposed to help young people come to terms with their sexuality.

    But here everything is so superficial that I can’t imagine what this young man (Tom Raczko) is even feeling, let alone how his friendship with another young boy came about, how they fell actually met, fell in love, and what they felt. All I know is that, from their smiles they enjoyed and had tender and fulfilling sex—maybe, but we can’t even be sure of that.

    In an event, it has somehow magically liberated our young frowning friend enough that he is moved to sit down and pen a letter to his Papa, presumably the confessions of the title.

    His father reads it and appears to slightly smile, although again we can’t be sure of that. But at least he doesn’t moan, groan, grab his heart, or speed out of the house with gun in hand. He appears

to have received the information, the “confession,” rather well. But is that the same as coming out?

    In the end I have no idea to whom such a short work intends to address or for that matter, even why. If perhaps it could truly express what it appears to have on its mind—it’s okay to be gay—there are certainly far better ways to say it, and there have been numerous far better films that actually done so.

    Such a sonorous score, this by David van Son, should be save for something far more momentous than what, at this point in time, might have been simply expressed around the breakfast table. I know it’s still difficult for so many young boys to face their sexuality and dangerous for them to tell others, but really this fat German pappa looks like he deserves and would be open to far more than a handwritten admission, as if the boy had committed some horrible crime which he now needed to admit.

    This is the kind of film that makes coming out all work and no play, with the fearful presumption of anger instead of joy. If I remember correctly, when I told my parents that I was gay, even if they didn’t take it well, it was out of the joy of my having found someone I loved that led to want to share the news with them. Even if they weren’t happy, I was. I wasn’t confessing, I was sharing the pleasure of coming to know how to love.

 

Los Angeles, December 2, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).