Playland, one Boston’s most notorious queer bars, is now a movie – but when will it show in Boston

Boston’s Playland Café first opened in The Great Depression (in 1937). The space became one of Boston’s most notorious queer bars, known for attracting a diverse clientele from all over the city. It would close 60+ years later in 1998 after it lost its entertainment license. The debut film by Georden West, an Emerson University graduate, is creating a lot of buzz and will premiere tomorrow at the Rotterdam’s International Film Festival.

Hopefully this film will make its way back across the Atlantic and have a screening here in Boston. I’ll be certain to share more when I learn of a confirmed date.

The film, Playland, is set up as a series of dreamlike interactions capturing moments over the bars 60+ years from the bar’s cooks, waiters, bartenders and drag performers, starting in the the late 1930s and running through the mid-’90s, building narrative with each additional story. West’s use of archival footage of the bar and its surrounding neighborhood, Boston’s Red Light district called the Combat Zone, adds nostalgia, recalling a time when Boston was far less affluent and a much more gritty city.