A Brazilian collective of cross-dressing, transgender, and non-binary friends filmed themselves in 2018 with a Mini DV camera, spontaneously and with little preparation. Four years later, the collective, As Talavistas and ela.ltda, edited the raw material to create a succession of prologues to a film that, as they say themselves, is continually in progress.
The result so far is a playful, personal, political and uncompromising self-portrait. The friends, all multiracial and thus doubly marginalized, talk frankly about themselves and the issues they struggle with, in a society that poses a constant danger to trans people. Brazil has the highest murder rate of transgender people in the world.
One of the friends says they feel they are “in a place that isn’t mine, in a role that isn’t mine.” They lead a clandestine life, off the beaten track, and refuse to participate in “imitating and serving a white masculinity.” The form of this film is also boundless and inventive, a flood of images and bright color filters—Raw Session is a film that transgresses boundaries in more than one way.
—Film note courtesy of IDFA
"Raw Session and Anhell69 offer profoundly affective meditations on grief, liminality, community, and willfulness through their rebellious cinematic interventions." —Natalie Erazo
This film screens as part of our Queer Latin American Series, presented in celebration of Pride Month. The films include I Carry You With Me (June 6), The Place Without Limits (June 13), Anhell69 (June 20), and Raw Session (June 27).