Genre
Synopsis
LILA AND MASON AND THE DYING TOWN follows 18-year-old Lila, a trans girl quietly navigating life in a small, rural Southern town. She works at Dollar General, keeps her head down, and dreams of becoming a nurse. Her boyfriend Mason—a former high school athlete drifting between oil changes and Friday night games—loves her deeply, but doesn’t always know how to see her fully.
As summer stretches on, Lila begins scrolling “tradwife” videos, trying to fit herself into a version of femininity that feels more acceptable, more “real.” Meanwhile, Mason’s old friends grow louder in their bigotry, emboldened by a new local law and a pastor who preaches the danger of blurred lines. Lila hears the rhetoric around her shift—from whispers to warnings—and learns how quickly acceptance turns conditional.
What begins as soft discomfort builds into a steady storm. A church sermon. A cruel joke at a summer festival. A ball game where the town’s congressman delivers a speech about gender “truth.” Each moment is small enough to pass, until it’s not. Through it all, Mason tries to protect Lila in the ways he understands—drives her to work, holds her hand in a crowd—but his silence starts to weigh as heavily as the threats she can’t ignore.
When Mason’s older brother Beau returns home after a stint in jail, the emotional distance between them is impossible to ignore. Once a local golden boy, now a cautionary tale, Beau watches Mason quietly become someone smaller, more afraid. Their bond—strained by past expectations and unspoken truths—becomes a mirror, forcing Mason to reckon with the cost of staying safe by staying silent.
With lyrical realism and restrained tension, LILA AND MASON AND THE DYING TOWN asks what it means to love someone who lives in danger—and what it takes for young men raised in silence to break the cycle. In the vein of The Rider, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, and A Love Song, this film explores the heartbreak of small-town identity, and the bravery it takes to want something more.
Bio
Ava Davis is a Sundance Fellow ('21, Trans Possibilities Intensive) and is also known as the Duchess of Grant Park. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her partner, and has appeared on stage in New York City (Pride50) and Atlanta (Alice in Wonderland, Peril, The Odd Couple). She has also appeared in films (Give Me an A, Could This Have Been An Email, The Duchess of Grant Park).
She is also an advocate for increasing trans and queer representation, especially that of black and other minorities. She founded her production company, Studio Vosges, in 2019 with the expressed purpose of telling the stories of queer and trans (GSM) black, brown, and beige people. She hosts the talk show, The Ava Davis Show, on you42.com.
She has acted in, written, and produced several short films, including Feast, The Decision, and the upcoming experimental horror short, Torn Together. She also created, produced, and acted in the short film The Duchess of Grant Park, about a trans woman who claims the Grant Park neighborhood of Atlanta as her duchy. With her production company, Davis recently signed a deal for this short film to screen and stream on Atlanta's PBS affiliate WABE for the next two years.
She is currently working to produce and secure financing for her first feature film, The Waltz, about a single young trans woman who teams up with a reluctant dance partner to pursue her dream of learning the waltz.
