Prime Time screens as part of Different Ways: Ian Giles / Rob Crosse / Sam Ashby, an afternoon event showing three films that expand on the context of Ian Giles’ current solo exhibition at Chelsea Space, After BUTT.

The selected films offer presentations of gay lives that shift away from a mainstream media depiction of gay men; here we see acts of love, counterculture and ageing through a queer lens. Within the works, politics and links between medical advances and sexual freedom play out on a domestic and international scale.

Prime Time, commissioned by FVU in 2017, follows a group of older gay men as they journey on a cruise ship around the Caribbean. Members of a social network of so-called ‘Prime Timers’, they regularly get together on excursions of this type, to renew acquaintances, re-affirm the bonds of belonging to a supportive community, and rekindle a little itch of adventure. Prime Time begs the question: when are we properly in the prime of our lives? In the flush of youth, with its energy and potential; or, later on, blessed with the maturity and experience of age? Deftly captured by Crosse’s oblique yet tender eye, the film is an affectionate study of human hopes and relationships, and a resonant meditation on how we both measure and deny the passing of time.