WATCH: A gay couple explores fatherhood in this moving drama about family lost & found

Thomas (Nico Tortorella) didn’t always know he wanted to be a dad. For a while, he didn’t think he could be.

But things changed once he met and fell deeply in love with Oscar (Juan Pablo Di Pace). After they got married, the thirty-something couple began to build a life together in East Los Angeles, the kind they always dreamed about, and soon they were foster dads to a boy named Arthur.

They were picture perfect—until Arthur’s mother came back into the picture, and Thomas and Oscar had to say goodbye, devastated over the sudden loss of the happy family they had built together.

And that’s just where The Mattachine Family begins. The feature debut of director Andy Vallentine—co-written with his husband Danny—is an emotional, heartwarming drama about family lost and found.

With Arthur gone, suddenly Thomas and Oscar find themselves with an empty space in their hearts and homes, one that brings the challenges of their relationship to the forefront.

Meanwhile, Thomas’ oldest and best friend Leah (Schitt’s Creek‘s Emily Hampshire) is dealing with a loss of her own, having recently miscarried. As they grieve together and try to move on, the friends grapple with what it actually means to make a family.

The film is an incredibly personal one for the Vallentines, born out of the filmmaking couple’s own discussions about happiness and fatherhood, especially as gay men who came of age when certain rights like marriage and parenthood weren’t granted to queer people.

“The journey that Thomas goes on throughout the film… it was kind of the same journey that we eventually went on,” Danny shared with Queerty last year. “And so a lot of that was taken from our life, as well as people we talked to—the experiences of the characters in the film are the experiences of our friends and people we reached out to.”

That includes Tortorella, who was also trying to have a child with their partner when the script first came their way—seeing themself in Thomas’s story, they knew the Vallentines’ film was something special, something they had to be a part of.

The rest of their cast is made up of a real who’s who of queer icons and allies, including Crazy Ex-Girlfriend‘s Cloie Wyatt Taylor, Single Parents‘ Jake Choi, The Princess Diaries‘ Heather Matarazzo, Hacks‘ Carl Clemons-Hopkins, and Teen Beach Movie‘s Garrett Clayton, reuniting with the directors after starring in their breakthrough short film The Letter Men. Oh, and it just so happens to boast Zach Braff as an executive producer!

A film festival favorite that’s been winning over audiences for the past year, The Mattachine Family is finally arriving to digital platforms on June 4—just in time for Pride Month—courtesy of Giant Pictures.

Queerty is honored to host the exclusive premiere of the film’s first official trailer, which you can watch below: