Shown as part of the Barbican’s Chronic Youth Film Festival, with the emphasis on the chronic.
The blurby bit
Seamlessly blending fiction and reality, Theo Montoya’s intoxicating debut feature creates a ‘trans cinema’ that follows no rules.
Set in the aftermath of the 2016 Colombian Peace Agreement, Anhell69 tells the story of a group of queer friends in Medellin as they navigate sex, drugs and a new nation still reeling from conflict. Based on a fictional film project of Montoya’s, Anhell69 explores what it means to tell stories about marginalised lives, culminating in a haunting meditation on friendship, death, and belonging.
From the Barbican listing
Introduction
The Chronic Youth Film Festival is curated by the Barbican Young Film Programmers, whose intake apparently changes on a yearly basis. I suppose that avoids anyone getting –gasp– old. The two young women who presented the screening looked as if they were early-twenties, so not that young. Not proper Village of the Damned anyway. A young man with a camera crouched nearby, snapping away, as they gave their introductory speech, stood stiffly together, no doubt having flashbacks to prefecture and assemblies.
Repeating the blurb from the website, we were also given trigger warnings for explicit references to sex, violence, drug use and suicide. If anyone was traumatised after the film we could seek them out and they would ‘provide a safe space’ for us. Fucking hell.
Something that did need genuinely need a trigger warning though, was them whinging that ‘art was political’ with a plea to click on a QR code which would take us straight through to a fundraising page to help make a documentary about the hospitals in Gaza. In other words, a request for us to send cash direct to Hamas. They were also sharing a Palestinian film index in light of the ‘current erasure of voices, stories and lives’. (Talking of erasure, there was no mention of the hostages taken from Israel, who, at the time of the screening, still numbered somewhere around the 133 mark. Also, zero condemnation or mention of the Hamas attack on October 7th.) The young film programmers, as a group, wanted institutions, like the Barbican, to actively condemn ‘the Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine’ and to show support for the ‘liberation of Palestinian people’. It was important to hope for a better future and demand this. Bleurgh.
On the film, it was the first film they definitely knew they wanted to be part of the festival, it was ‘a trans film without borders, full of love and beauty,’ they said.
The film
Strong stylistically
The film, I have to say, was rather good and interesting stylistically. It had a particularly strong cinematic opening, very film noir, a car at night being tracked, the contrast of red in the darkness of night. Hypnotic and intense. Panoramic views of the city at night. Then, inside the car, a man in a coffin, bathed in red hue, we kept returning to. It’s the strongest opening I’ve seen in a long time and throughout there were similar stark visual flares.
Gay erasure?
But, let me say this right now, there is no sense in which this is a ‘trans’ film. None at all. There are only a couple of passing references to trans issues per se, one androgynous-looking man mentions he wants to take hormones. Another man, heavily bearded, a drug user and possibly selling sex, says he sees himself with tits in the near future. That’s it.
The director, who narrates the film, explicitly says it is a ‘trans film’ and ‘without gender’ but this is negated by the fact that his chosen talking heads are all gay men. I suspect this was a cynical move, or perhaps of necessity, since labelling anything ‘trans’ these days makes it much more likely to get noticed and this is one of those films which is mainly going to be seen via international film festivals. Calling it ‘trans’ perhaps ensured that it got platformed?
Lack of information
The film’s real weakness though is claiming to be any sort of documentary, as the lack of factual information it gives about the city it depicts – Medellin – is crippling. Medellin was the home of Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel and, although Escobar is mentioned, scant context is given, so if you don’t know, you won’t know. It also references it is set in the aftermath of the 2016 Colombian Peace Agreement*, similarly unexplained.
*The 2016 agreement saw the end of a 50 year period of guerrilla fighting, with guerrilla commanders being excused for war crimes and even allowed to run for office. The guerrilla fighting also mainly affected those living in the countryside.
Anti-gay violence?
So, it definitely isn’t a trans film then, since all of its subjects are young gay men, mostly middle class, I think, since most are still studying, all early twenties. Absent fathers are emphasised and perhaps related to the legacy of the Medellin Cartel. The Catholic Church looms large, as you’d expect, but then there is a fictionalised element which covers up more than it tells – that spectrophiliacs (people who have sex with ghosts) were clamped down on by the government and the church, meaning there are/were spectrophiliac hunters who hunt to kill. All this shot in an appropriate ghostly fashion. I took this as a metaphor for homosexual sex and those men who might visit vengeance on the same, since a very specific accusation is made about deliberate victimisation.
However, on looking online, Medellin itself is described as an okay place for gay travellers to visit, as listed by several different websites. It holds an annual Pride march with an estimated 80,000 people attending in 2023. Same sex marriage is legal in Colombia and it recognises hatred based on sexual orientation and gender identity as an aggravating factor in crime (Source: Stonewall). Recently the US Embassy advised travellers not to use dating apps following some suspicious deaths, but this was a general warning. In 2022, six gay men were found murdered in similar circumstances (one article describing the same, egregiously describes them as ‘LGBTQ+’). The article also mentions that the details of the murders were felt to suggest the work of a serial killer, rather than institutional or gang-related.
There is a shocking revelation that a man was murdered in a local park by impalement. We are told it was homophobic in nature but no further details given, so there is no way to investigate the story further. Thus, the issue of anti-gay violence is not really clear, though historical grainy footage (again, no context given) of what I assumed to be a masked cartel member, exhorts the social cleansing of ‘fags’ and other undesirables and imposes an 8pm curfew, and is pretty terrifying.
Making a friend of death
There was much talk and meditation on death, those these days Medellin is a much safer place, no longer dubbed the murder capital of the world. Thus the men documented are from a generation who narrowly escaped the endemic violence and benefited from the city’s renewed prosperity.
During the film, it is claimed that several of the talking heads subsequently died during and/or following shooting (six, if I recall correctly). One too many to be believable, frankly. It seems one definitely did die – Camilo Najar, of a heroin overdose I discovered after. Were the rest just a fictional element then? It seems a strange thing to claim, if so. Eight men’s names are displayed at the end, presumably with their dates-of-birth and -deaths, but again whenever a death is mentioned, no light is thrown on the cause (drug overdose, suicide, murder, natural causes – we just don’t know). If the problem really is drug overdosing it would have been nice to have acknowledged that.
Back to the ‘trans’ question
On the whole my reviews are not reviews in the strict sense, more an attempt to understand how such artistic pieces relate back to the wider cultural landscape. So I’ll repeat my position, there is no sense in which one would regard this as a trans film. It seems the director believes that the use of motifs coupled with the lack of explanation is ‘trans’. It’s a perfectly fine choice, of course, not to explain every single detail in a semi-fictional piece, but telling that long established cinematic techniques are deemed ‘trans’, i.e. subversive, as opposed to being the foundation of the form. But there you go, just say ‘trans’ and a cash register pings somewhere.
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