Showing: 18 November 2024
Directed by acclaimed Argentinian artist, writer and theatre maker Lola Arias, whose work typically plays with the overlap between reality and fiction, Reas is one of the most inventive and surprising queer films you’ll see this year.
Yoseli has a tattoo of the Eiffel Tower on her back and has always wanted to travel but was arrested at the airport for drug trafficking. Nacho is a trans man who was caught swindling and started a rock band in jail.
What started as a drama workshop for the incarcerated as a way of re-imagining their futures, transforms into a multi-genre hybrid-performance film, using song and dance as a means of liberation from past trauma and a vehicle for radical change in the lives of those on screen.
Shot by Arias on location in a disenfranchised Buenos Aires prison, Reas embodies a collective work that transcends the restrictions of any one genre, allowing its subjects to re-interpret their past as fiction and inventing, through fantasy, a possible future for themselves together. Funny, awkwardly charming and raw, Reas is a cathartic reframing of queer solidarity, kinship and mutual emancipation.