We open the 7th edition of Queer Film Festival Utrecht with Argentinian director Lola Arias’ energetic and deeply sincere docu/fiction/musical REAS (2024).
Gentle or rough, blonde or shaved, cis or trans, long-term inmates or newly admitted: in this hybrid musical, women reenact their lives in a Buenos Aires prison through trance and balance, voguing and singing.
REAS is a charming piece of collective empowerment that reinvents the musical genre: the performers dance and sing about their past in prison, relive their life as fiction, and invent, through fantasy and imagination, a possible future for themselves.
Director Lola Arias: “The aim of REAS was not to make another prison drama but to focus on the bonds of love and community between cis women and trans people that keep them alive in a space of confinement and violence.”
After seeing powerful imagination contest the confines of prison-walls, we join forces with experimental emancipation space PERRX—a hallmark of Utrecht’s latinx-queer club scene. Harboring Revolutionary Joy through activism and artistic expression, PERRX leads us deep into the night with latinx-queer sounds, from neoperreo, cumbia villera, and salsa, to category defying tunes.
