When queer experimental filmmaker Charles Lum passed away in 2021, he left me in charge of his body of work, including the Super 8 films that he had shot in the 1970s and 80s and several undeveloped cartridges of Super 8 film. Before his death, we had talked about wanting to use this footage for a new feature about his sex life and the thousands of encounters he had in his lifetime. When I developed his old Super 8 cartridges, I was pleasantly surprised by the beautifully degraded images. After reading Charles’ cruising diaries, I came up with the idea to make a film about an older man desperately trying to remember all of his lovers and sexual encounters. His memory is fading, and the films he shot of his former lovers are disintegrating. I incorporated Super 8 footage that I had shot in the ’80s and ’90s and shot new footage on Charles’s outdated Super 8 film to flesh out the story and create new memories.
Before video was available, Super 8 was really the first consumer format which allowed people to film things in their own lives. The first “sex tapes” were shot on Super 8 film. You associate it with home movies or documentaries, so in some ways it represents reality more than 16mm film or 35mm film. You don’t really think of it as being a narrative format. Super 8 film is sort of a heightened reality.
I started by assembling Charles’ footage and then incorporated material I’d already shot to flesh out his stories. Then, after that, I figured out what else I needed to shoot. I approached this as a visual film about memory, so I wanted to shape the visuals first. To do that, I used Charles’ diaries and the stories that he’d told me as well as some of my own memories. Charles would write about his sexual encounters on whatever scraps of paper he could find. He would sometimes go into graphic detail without knowing the other people’s names or anything about them except what they were wearing and how they presented themselves. There was something quite touching about this. The need to remember these anonymous encounters to store them away for future reference (perhaps for this film?) showed how important they were to him. They weren’t just a mindless, emotionless quick release. There was a real connection there with another human being, and this upended the idea of what anonymous sex is. The danger and excitement are there, but that wasn’t the driving force for Charles’ cruising.
We think of film as being something permanent, but it isn’t really. It degrades, it disintegrates, it starts falling apart, and the colors and images start to fade. I thought there was a nice parallel between someone trying to remember things and the films they’d shot disintegrating. So their memories are fading, and the films are fading at the same time. I also wanted to think about memories and dreams and how they are related and how they can get confused (especially sexual ones). There is confusion about what is real and what isn’t, and about what’s objective and what’s subjective, and what’s conscious and what’s unconscious. Your memories are an ethereal thing; they’re not permanent, they fade with you, and I think there’s something beautiful about that.
MEMORIBLIA screens at the Arzner Cinema, 10 Bermondsey Square, London SE1 3UN, on Friday, 27th March at 10pm. Todd Verow will be there for a Q&A after the screening.
Charles and Todd Verow co-directed the feature documentaries Age Of Consent (about the infamous, now closed London club The Hoist) and Sex & The Silver Gays. The short films they directed together include: Tom’s Gift, Been too Long At The Fair, Secret Santa Sex Party, Blow Job 2017 and posthumously My All out First Time (which won the Audience Award at the Oslo/Fusion International Film Festival) and Death Race. Charles is the subject and co-author, with Verow, of the 2023 documentary feature Charles Lum: This Is Where I get Off.
You can also see Todd Verow’s UK Premiere of Behind the Open Door + Q&A (a very explicit documentary) at the Arzner on Friday 20 March, 2026.
