Great Moments in Movie Titles, Toronto Film Fest Edition: ‘Young People Fucking’

This week film fans turn their eyes north of the border, as the Toronto International Film Festival becomes the temporary center of the cinematic world. The festival, which opens tomorrow, features plenty of high-profile Oscar-bait movies getting splashy screenings — Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Atonement, and I’m Not There among them — but there’s only one film at the fest that has Toronto newspaper editors chewing their fingernails, and Vulture gleefully awaiting the upcoming awkward headlines: Young People Fucking, a romantic comedy directed by Martin Gero.

As far as we can tell, Young People Fucking looks interesting and has an actual plot — it’s not, you know, the hetero version of similarly titled Off Broadway sausage-fest Naked Boys Singing — but it also has a title that makes it tough for newspapers to cover it. The Toronto Star’s public editor has already run a column discussing the paper’s internal debate about printing the movie’s title. The Star’s editor-in-chief has decided to print the title as Young People F——, saying the Star is a “family newspaper,� and that he has “received well-reasoned complaints from parents when we have, against our own rule, veered into a freer use of obscenities or sexually charged language.� This decision was made over the protests of the paper’s movie critic, who believes that the title is an artistic choice and that expurgating it is a kind of censorship.

Though we love it when newspapers drop the F-bomb, we don’t really think this counts as censorship; if you name your movie Young People Fucking, you’re doing it precisely for this kind of attention. We do, however, think that if the Toronto Star is so worried about vulgarity on its pages, perhaps the time has come to replace that editor-in-chief, the one who made the decision to replace “Fucking� with “F——.� His name, delightfully, is Fred Kuntz, but we’ll just call him “Fred K—-� for propriety’s sake.

Young People Fucking [IMDb]
F-word banned, even in film title [Toronto Star]