Week 8/2025
Queer cinema has long been a space for radical storytelling, challenging dominant narratives and opening up new ways of seeing. This week’s films are odes to queerness and defiance.
De Cinema opens our selection with De cierta manera [One Way or Another] (1974), the only feature film by Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez. While not a queer film per se, its fluid blending of fiction and documentary, along with its critique of rigid social structures, establishes a queering perspective as the first feature to be made by a woman in Cuba. The film follows a romance between a teacher and a bus driver, exploring how class, machismo, and racism intersect in everyday life. A statement from the opening credits also nicely set the tone for the films in this overview: “Feature film about real people and some fictitious ones.” Preceding the screening is a lecture by Wouter Hessels on Latin American cinema of the 60s and 70s, contextualising Gómez’s work within broader cinematic and political movements.
Also at De Cinema, but later in the week, is Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), Toshio Matsumoto’s avant-garde depiction of Tokyo’s queer underground. Following Eddie, a transgender hostess caught in a web of desire and betrayal, the film is an explosion of experimental techniques, blending pop art aesthetics with political unrest. Matsumoto described its structure as letting a mirror fall to pieces and picking up the shards to piece it together again. Rumoured to have influenced Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, it remains a landmark of the Japanese New Wave.
At KASKcinema, A Rainha Diaba [The Devil Queen] (1974) shifts the focus to the underbelly of 1970s Rio de Janeiro. Inspired by a real-life figure, this film follows the flamboyant and ruthless drug lord Rainha Diaba. Director Antonio Carlos da Fontoura crafts a violent, camp spectacle that prefigures the aesthetic of Pedro Almodóvar’s early films. As da Fontoura put it: “What fascinated me as a director was the possibility of inventing a different reality, far from all polite limits, in camera movements, strident sound, art collages, set decoration, costumes, subversive makeup, penetrating music, burlesque acting, in the red of blood, in the gold of sequins.”