Full Movie | Trailer

A hybrid of documentary and fiction, Rukus is a queer coming-of-age story set in the liminal spaces of furry conventions, southern punk houses, and virtual worlds. Rukus is a 20-year-old furry artist, living with his boyfriend Sable in the suburbs of Orlando, Florida. In his sketchbooks, Rukus is constructing an imaginary universe - a sprawling graphic novel in which painful childhood memories are restaged as an epic fantasy. Brett is a 16-year-old filmmaker with OCD, working on a documentary about kinky subcultures in spite of his own anxiety. After an interview leads to an online friendship, their lives entwine in ways that push them into strange, unexplored territories.

 

"A highly personal docu-fiction hybrid of significant scope and emotional power . . . Rukus creates a contemplative space where the subject itself keeps transforming."
Sheila O'Malley - Film Comment

"A love letter to fandom . . . Rukus casts animal shadows behind misfits who play muses for each other, and delivers bittersweet satisfaction."
Patch O'Furr - Dogpatch Press

"A penetrating and wonderful evocation of adolescence . . . Under a double register of reality, it is an imaginary self-portrait, fragmented, uncertain, in perpetual becoming. Something from Tarnation, archetype of the ramshackle diary, at the same time as the mythical Donnie Darko."
Jacques Mandelbaum - Le Monde

"What starts as a film about a lost friend and the furry fandom turns out to be a work of art about the ways we create art and ourselves."
Julian Modugno - Wussy Magazine

Screenings

SF Indie Fest
SXSW Film Festival
Furry Weekend Atlanta
Indie Grits Film Festival
Anthology Film Archives - Cinema of Gender Transgression Series
Nashville Film Festival - TN First Grand Jury Award
San Diego Underground Film Festival
Mephit Fur Meet
Furpocalypse
Indie Memphis Film Festival - Best Hometowner Feature
Cinémathèque Française - American Fringe: Season 3
CalArts
Lake County Film Festival
Indie Memphis Nights
Portland Unknown TV
Johnson City Film Festival - Best Directing
FangCon
Pleasure Style Attitude
University of Vermont
qFLIX Philadelphia
Trans Stellar Film Festival
Journées Cinématographiques - La Part animal
Furry BlackLight 9
Anthrocon
Trashpalace

Press (cont.)

"Hanover interweaves a multitude of filters, using docufiction and the private diary to produce not a feeling of proximity but a multiplication of masks."   Adrienne Boutang - débordements

"Rukus leaves a lot of traces of himself on the Internet but hardly seems to exist in the present - in fact, the images that reach us of him always come too late."  Laura Tuiller - Libération

"A deep engagement with something like experimental sublimation in queer life: the transformation of inaccessible or not-yet-known desires into niche cultural practices or, vice-versa, the therapeutic possibilities of acts that we recognize as inherently sexual."   Ben Levinson - Tone Glow

"Taps into something universally true about the roles of community and identity in our larger modern digital hellscape."   Brandon Ledet - Swampflix

"Its cinematic style mirrors the fluid sexuality spectrum of its principal cast . . . Rukus is about the benefits of being inquisitive and adventurous, ridding oneself of definitions and boundaries."   Don Simpson - Hammer to Nail

Written and Directed by BRETT HANOVER
In Collaboration with ALANNA STEWART and KATHERINE DOHAN
Additional Art and Writing by RUKUS   Original Music by BRIAN SAIA
Animation by KAROLINA GLUSIEC, BEN HOLM, and EUSONG LEE

Rukus is in the public domain.