A Coming of Age story.

Tom Maillard is a teenage boy for whom peace and fulfillment seem impossible. Restless and dissatisfied, he expects little of life, and is happy to relieve his frustration and boredom in rebellious ways. With flippant disregard, he shouts down his mother Valerie, a young, single mother and hard-working flight attendant, assuring her that he'll go on doing whatever he pleases.

Valerie is frustrated by Tom – who is all-too-quickly verging on adulthood – since he manifests all the instability that characterized his father, an airline pilot he has never met. Certain that Valerie drove his father away, Tom harbors a deep resentment for his mother. And yet, Tom and Valerie love and depend on each other, like two refugees stranded together on an emotional desert island.

Everything changes for Tom when he and Valerie are involved in a terrible car accident. Tom revives in the hospital, but finds his mother in a coma. Since they had been bitterly arguing when their car overturned, Tom is deeply remorseful, but has no one to whom he can confess his sorrow. When he is placed by the juvenile court in a group home, Tom faces new challenges getting along with his fellow residents (all of them similarly traumatized). His lifelong wish for a father figure is granted in the person of Malik, who oversees the group home, but Tom gets more than he bargained for when stoic, formidable Malik imposes the stern, and at times, stinging discipline that he has been missing in his life.

When Valerie awakes from her coma, Tom is shocked to learn that she has lost her memory, which, he is told, may only come back through reminders of the past, and possibly through some terrible shock. With the support of Malik and a sympathetic female doctor, Tom tries to rebuild a relationship with his mother, offering her tokens of memories lost, and confronting a bank of memories that even he regrets.

But when he learns the whereabouts of his long-lost grandparents, along with some sinister secrets about them, he must face a man's decision: whether to restore Valerie's horrific past to her, or protect her from its ravages... even as he confronts the demons of his own past.

About the Picture This! Entertainment "Coming of Age" collection:

Although the films in the "Coming of Age Collection" are not gay per se, they were carefully selected for their uncanny appeal to gay audiences. The Collection explores coming-of-age themes with this series of highly pedigreed films about youngsters fighting to survive in a world turned upside down by adults. The Collection showcases an international array of top quality, critically acclaimed, award-winning films that tap into the adolescent in all of us and rekindle those memories that have shaped our development into adults. For sophisticated audiences looking for well-made motion pictures from around the world, the Coming of Age Collection has much to offer.