The words ‘small-town family business’ tend to conjure up a twee image. Convenience stores and manual trades, homely restaurants and pet shops. However, for Shawney Cohen, the family business was a strip club. When he was six years old, his father bought a bar near Toronto and turned it into a strip club called The Manor with an adjoining 32-room hotel. It was a bold move made following a streak of bad luck; a last-ditch attempt to secure the quality of life he had imagined for himself. The family would never be the same again.
In his debut feature-length film, Cohen looks at the impact of the decision 30 years on. His 400-pound father Roger is preparing for stomach-reduction surgery, his 85-pound mother Brenda is struggling with anorexia, and his brother Sammy is preparing to follow in his dad’s footsteps after beginning work at The Manor in his teens. Meanwhile, Shawny attempts to sort through the pieces the only way he knows how. While most documentaries set around strip clubs, understandably, tend to focus on the club, The Manor relegates it to scenery, bringing into focus a tragi-comic portrait of the unlikely family behind the scenes.
Originally released in 2013, The Manor opened Hot Docs, won the Tribeca Film Institute Documentary Fund, and was nominated at the Zurich Film Festival. We are streaming an exclusive uncut version now at VICE: Members Only.
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