The Latinx LGBTQ+ Film Festival began in 2016, showing films from a marginalized community that refuses to accept a relegated role in society. But it’s not just about resistance or cheerleading; it’s about opening channels between communities for conversations and understanding to flow through.
So it’s all free, is in both English and Spanish with subtitles, and welcoming to all ages and identities. It’s organized by The Epicenter for LBGTQIA+ youth, so they’re eager for young people to see themselves reflected on the big screen.
Extra Terrestres by Carla Cavina is about a woman who is an astrophysicist and lives in the Canary Islands with her girlfriend, who returns home to Puerto Rico to try to reconcile her own life with her family’s – especially her father’s – expectations of her.
La Pureza is an award-winning, five-minute documentary by Pedro Vikingo about five young kids who are wanting to transition to another gender. This is a controversial topic, but the film is a charming short that purports to show kids in command of the decision.
These are indie films, with varying levels of polish and artistry.
Adelina Anthony’s short film Ode to Pablo is a vignette in the lives of young gay men playing a game of pickup basketball. Pablo is Afro-Latino and happens to be deaf. That is one example of the intersection of LGBTQ+ and other aspects of identity – poor, young, religious, class – in the festival.
It plays like a romance with complications, but makes clever use of subtitles that inform us (and hearing-impaired audiences) of the sounds that Pablo can’t hear, or tell us what he is thinking, or impart helpful information (“earbuds = passing in the deaf community”).
When one young man makes a move for Pablo, he counters with, “Just because I’m deaf and gay doesn’t make me lesser.” But it sounds a little like over-reacting. The film shows Pablo signing in slo-mo, which draws out the beauty of the gestures, but ends with quotes that are more prescriptive than inspirational.
But Ode to Pablo is a revelation, because when have you seen a protagonist who is deaf, gay, black and Latino?
Muxes: The Third Gender by Ivan Olita is a beautifully shot and edited 10-minute documentary set in the Istmo de Tehuantepec region of Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca, where indigenous communities recognize a gender somewhere between male and female – something like transgender.
“In [the town of] Juchitan,” one subject says, “women are women, men are men, and muxes, well, they are muxes.”
This is a nonlinear film, told with artistry, the images working like paintings, the words acting as poetic commentary, and music and sound design giving it energy. Various members of this muxes community – men dressing in elaborate women’s clothes, including in the indigenous Juchitec tradition of long dresses and braided hair – tell us about their lives and dreams as the camera finds them in their barber shop business, driving a three-wheeled taxi, dancing at night, talking to children, going to the gym or walking through an outdoor cafe.
The point is that the muxes live out in the open, without fear of reprisal or scorn, and are integrated in the greater society – not at its margins.
“Here is a matriarchal culture,” one muxes says. “The Istmo region is a thing of its own.”
This acceptance may come down to language. Apparently, in the ancient Zapotec, there is no gender difference when referring to a man or woman; that change in language came with Spanish conquistadores.
The subjects in these films want to be self-sufficient, to be themselves, to grow old with someone, to be accepted. That is not radical or strange, that is pretty near universal. There’s nothing “other” about humans wanting to fulfill their potential in the one lifetime we have on this earth.
Following the Sunday screening of the short Muxes is a feature-length doc titled Atempa: Suenos a la Orilla del Rio (Dreams by the River). It’s about the same subject, but told through the point of view of a young boy who dreams of becoming a revered muxes.
In one scene, someone cues up a stereo to play a live concert by Selena, and behind a makeshift curtain in a small rural home, a kid emerges – a skinny boy with a mic and wearing earrings, smiling before a small audience on plastic lawn chairs. He seems nervous waiting for the music’s intro, then comes alive in singing. It shows how vulnerable young people can be, and how insistently their inner selves want free expression.
Pollsters, politicians, advertisers and Hollywood don’t have enough imagination or interest to show us the multiplicity of human life. Indie filmmakers do. And they can expand our understanding about each other one film at a time.
The festival is not all activism. Cassandro, the Exotico is Marie Losier’s 16mm feature documentary about the waning years of openly gay wrestler Cassandro, the “Liberace of lucha libre.” And there’s going to be poetry, spoken word, dance and other performances Saturday evening. This festival is also just entertaining. Which is not nothing.