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CASA ROSHELL is Directed by Camila José Donoso | Mexico/Chile, 2017| digital video, color, 71 min | Spanish with English subtitles.
During a trip to Mexico in 2014, after making Naomi Cambel (2013), the director Camila José Donoso learned about Club Roshell: a private site founded by the trans artist and activist Roshell Terranova in 2004, populated by men looking for somewhere they can assume an alternative gender role and explore their identity. Over six weeks, the filmmaker visited the club, observing, talking to, and generating dialogue with its members, and finally combining them to make this film, which she describes as a “Trans Fiction.” The film is ultimately fictional, but written using real-life historical context and dialogue fragments, and performed, in many cases, by the club’s community members—in hallways, nooks and crannies and mirrors. The distinctive dialogues that happen in the nighttime privacy of Casa Roshell are full of agreements, disagreements and spectacular moments, allowing viewers to realize how the multiplicity of trans experiences, which are on full display in the club, are so infrequently seen elsewhere.
This film screening is part of ¡Rebeladas! Una approximación al cine de mujeres en Latinoamérica curated by DRCLAS Visiting Scholar, Cecilia Barrientos, and part of of the DRCLAS Thematic Initiative, Remapping Latin American Cinema.
Presented in collaboration with Harvard Film Archive