Drafthouse Films Unveils ‘THE FINAL MEMBER’

Paris has the Louvre. London has the Tate Modern, and New York the Metropolitan Museum.

But Husavik, Iceland—a diminutive village on the fringe of the Arctic Circle—boasts the world’s only museum devoted exclusively to painstakingly preserved male genitalia. Founded and curated by Sigurður “Siggi” Hjartarson, the Icelandic Phallological Museum houses four decades worth of mammalian members, from a petite field mouse to the colossal sperm whale, and every “thing” in between. But, lamentably, Siggi’s collection lacks the holy grail of phallic phantasmagoria: a human specimen. Siggi’s world changes dramatically when he receives generous offers from an elderly Icelandic Casanova and an eccentric American. However, as the competition for eternal penile preservation heats up between the two men, Siggi soon discovers that this process is more complicated than it initially appeared. In their debut feature film, Jonah Bekhor and Zach Math follow Siggi on his dogged, often emotional quest to complete his exhibition in a peculiar, yet startlingly relatable, story of self-fulfillment and the value of personal legacies (both big and small).

The wonderful thing about The Final Member is the balance of its subject's deep-rooted sincerity and the film's sublimely comic hilarity. Badass Digest's own Film Crit Hulk reviewed the film from its premiere at Fantastic Fest last year saying its "solidly funny, consistently entertaining, and occasionally beautiful…roots its strongest aspect in the thematic implications of its subject. The Final Member isn't actually a film about penises, but a film about the way we cling to youth and legacy in the face of loss. A film about the way we confront the age old questions of existentialism."

Making its festival premieres at HotDocs, SilverDocs and Fantastic Fest in 2012, stranger-than-fiction doc The Final Member will receive the Drafthouse Films treatment in April of 2014 with a day-and-date theatrical/VOD and direct digital release via our friends at VHX. Sign up for the Drafthouse Alliance today and become a member (get it??), and receive this in addition to nine other Drafthouse Films titles on DVD or Blu-ray straight to your door!