BOYS OF SIN

Feature Film

Released from an overseas prison, LUKE HENRY pursues a deferred dream of becoming a professional dancer. Accepted at a prestigious ballet academy and stripping at Toronto’s first male strip club for cash, Luke soon discovers that the two crafts make for dangerous bedfellows. Will Luke’s dedication and discipline survive the seductive hedonism of the strip club or will he succumb to temptation and continue down a road of self-destruction?

Toronto, 1980. Home after serving time in an oversea prison, LUKE HENRY renews his pursuit of a professional dance career, aided by DANIEL WINCHELL new owner of the studio where Luke first studied dance. To finance his dream, he wins a spot as a house dancer at Lucy’s Den, Toronto’s first male strip club.

Convinced by Daniel to pursue a solid ballet technique Luke takes the grueling audition for the prestigious Chernshevsky Ballet Academy. Luke is originally cut but later accepted after the institution comes under fire for elitist and racist practices.

Reveling in his new-found success and freedom, Luke dives into a toxic pool of easy money, drugs, and late-night parties. Only Daniel and MARIE THOMPSON (aka, SENSURIE), the club’s owner, retired exotic dancer and quiet believer in his dream stand by him, trying to guide him away from taking a final plunge into the remorseless depths of the fast life.

As he struggles to adjust to the ballet world, Luke’s disruptive street persona and late-night antics rattles the school’s conservative artistic director BRIGITTE CABRAL’s iron hold on the academy’s younger, wealthier, white students. Pulling out all the stops to expel him from the school, Brigitte must win over a recalcitrant board of directors hesitant to once again embroil the school in controversy. If she finds out about Luke’s underground double life and criminal past, his dream of becoming a professional dancer is finished.

Luke’s problems deepen when a new drug - crack cocaine - begins wreaking underworld havoc and the dawn of the AIDS epidemic brings his world to a continuous point of crisis.
Soon Luke finds himself facing a stark choice; succumb to the lures of Yonge Street’s infamous sin strip and a return to a life without a future or risk body and soul to achieve what may very well be an unachievable goal: become a dancer performing on the world stage.