Of An Age, the new film from Australian-based director Goran Stolevski, is a romantic day trip through old loves and missed connections.

The film is set in the summer of 1999 and follows Kol (Elias Anton), a Serbian-born, Australian 17-year-old who misses his ballroom competition to pick up his hungover girlfriend and dance partner, Ebony (Hattie Hook), after a bender. He enlists the help of Ebony's older brother, Adam (Thom Green), and the closeted teen is thrown into an intense 24-hour whirlwind of his first love. Cut to 2010, when the three return to the small Australian town for Ebony's wedding, and these people who were once so important to each other are reintroduced all over again.

It's a sweeping, anxiously romantic story that captures all the teen angst of your first love and juxtaposes it with the quiet tragedies of adulthood.

Ahead of its U.S. release, it's already garnering comparisons to Call Me By Your Name, the Academy Award-winning queer drama of 2017. Both films track a romance between a teen and a twenty-something, and beautifully capture the intensity when all that aching and longing feels so big it's almost suffocating. And both films explore what happens when the world pulls you apart. While there are parallels, Of An Age, distinctly marks its own identity with a time skip to when the two men are eleven years older. But if we learned anything from the discourse surrounding Call Me By Your Name, some folks might not be happy about the age gap between Adam and Kol, who are about 23 and 17 respectively.

"I didn't really feel it to be controversial," Green, who plays Adam in the film, tells PRIDE. From his "own sort of code of ethics, I didn't even think that there would be other people who would maybe say that." He pauses to think for a second. "With Adam, it was more of someone who had been through so much on his own. We don't know too much about Adam's history, but he definitely does see himself in Kol and sort of takes it upon himself to guide him." Adam takes Kol under his wing in a sense, and helps "him realize who he is and to not really give a shit about what other people think. I was reading it more from that standpoint. Not so much as maybe, I don't know, more of a sinister side."

With the modern consciousness surrounding age gaps and escalating derogatory language thrown at LGBTQ+ folks from homophobes, we do want to be careful with how youth is explored in romance, both real and fictional. The distinction is these specific characters, and their specific story, simply isn't something predatory, but a mutual connection between two people who were lucky enough to find each other and share a day on this big floating rock we call Earth. Many of us know firsthand what it feels like to have a crush on an older guy, straight or gay. We know that rush when you're closeted and meet a queer person who has already quieted those anxieties and is living more honestly than you could imagine for yourself, and you're infatuated with the how and the why. The quiet admissions contained in flitting eye contact. The heat of those first flirtations.

Those stories, like this one, are honest and authentic and Of An Age portrays those feelings with tenderness and beauty.

For an indie film from Melbourne and Victoria, it's wild for the stars and the director to see the film getting international attention before it's even widely released.

"It's incredibly overwhelming," Green says. Early viewers of the film are already coming up to the two stars and "saying thank you for telling my story." He recalls sitting in that Kingswood car on the first day on set, and he had no idea how the film would turn out or where it would go, and now it's struck a chord with viewers all over the world. "I mean, what greater feeling?"

Of An Age premieres in theaters February 17th, 2023. Watch the trailer below:

Of An Age - Official Trailer - Only In Theaters February 17www.youtube.com