''Pray Away'' is a 2021 American

documentary film A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in te ...

produced and directed by Kristine Stolakis. It follows survivors of

conversion therapy Conversion therapy is the pseudoscientific practice of attempting to change an individual's sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to align with heterosexual and cisgender norms. In contrast to evidence-based medicine and cli ...

, and former leaders.

Jason Blum Jason Ferus Blum "Jason Ferus Blum was born in LA in 1969 to Shirley Neilsen, an art professor, and Irving Blum, an art dealer" (; born 1969) is an American film and television producer. He is the founder and CEO of Blumhouse Productions, whi ...

and Ryan Murphy serve as executive producers. It had its world premiere at the

Tribeca Film Festival The Tribeca Festival is an annual film festival organized by Tribeca Productions. It takes place each spring in New York City, showcasing a diverse selection of film, episodic, talks, music, games, art, and immersive programming. Tribeca was ...

on June 16, 2021. It was released on August 3, 2021, by

Netflix Netflix, Inc. is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service and production company based in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California, it offers a ...

Synopsis

The film follows survivors and former leaders of

, as some leaders grapple with their actions against others, while others

come out Coming out of the closet, often shortened to coming out, is a metaphor used to describe LGBT people's self-disclosure of their sexual orientation, romantic orientation, or gender identity. Framed and debated as a privacy issue, coming out of ...

Release

''Pray Away'' had its world premiere at the

on June 16, 2021. Prior to,

acquired distribution rights to the film. It also screened at

AFI Docs The AFI Docs (formerly Silverdocs) documentary film festival is an American international film festival created by the American Film Institute and the Discovery Channel. It is held every year in Silver Spring, Maryland and Washington, D.C. Starte ...

on June 24, 2021. It was previously set to screen at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2020, and the

Telluride Film Festival The Telluride Film Festival (TFF) is a film festival held annually in Telluride, Colorado during Labor Day weekend (the first Monday in September). The 49th edition took place on September 2 -6, 2022. History First held on 30 August 1974, t ...

prior to their cancellations. It was released on August 3, 2021.

Critical reception

On review aggregator website

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wan ...

, ''Pray Away'' holds an approval rating of 94% based on 32 reviews, with an average rating of 8.40/10. The site's critics consensus reads, "''Pray Away'' presents a compassionate picture of the damage wrought by so-called conversion therapy – on its subjects as well as its proponents". On

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc ...

, the film has a weighted average of 71 out of 100 based on 6 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

Accolades

References

External links

*{{IMDb title, 11224358 2021 documentary films 2021 films 2021 LGBT-related films American LGBT-related films American documentary films Blumhouse Productions films Netflix original documentary films Documentary films about LGBT topics Documentary films about LGBT and Christianity Films about conversion therapy 2020s English-language films 2020s American films