Dir. Theo Montoya
2022, Columbia/Romania/France/Germany, 75 min
Spanish with English subtitles
A few years back, director Theo Montoya cast several people from Medellín’s queer scene for his first feature film, a vampire movie about a dystopian city where ghosts coexist with the living. He chose charismatic 21-year-old Camilo Najar for the starring role, but a week later Camilo died of an overdose. The director lost many friends in the same manner.
Montoya previously filmed a portrait of Camilo in his powerful, punky short Son of Sodom (2020). In Anhell69, he dives deeper into a no-future generation torn apart by drugs and suicide in a city defined by violence. All hope is gone, and getting stoned is all that’s left. Montoya sees Medellín as a ghost town lost in the mountains, a place where you can’t see the horizon, and from which you can never escape.
After attending more funerals than birthdays among his circle of friends, Montoya descends into an existential void. But he picks up the camera again anyway, and—in emulation of his great inspiration Victor Gaviria—makes a film without borders or genders: a “trans film” about all those people who don’t belong to anything or anyone.
Plays with
Small Fires, Dir. Nic Wilson, 2022, Canada, 6 min
Small Fires is a real-time video of a bouquet of flower-shaped candles burning
until they extinguish themselves. There is an essay about the mythology and use of candles embedded in the subtitle track.
