Writer and Director: Lola Arias
Director Lola Arias asked the subjects of her quirky documentary, all ex-cons, to go back inside and re-imagine their time in jail. Stunningly filmed in an abandoned prison (Arias says her film is an ex-film; ex-prison, ex-cons), the Argentinian Reas is a queer delight. It features a cast of cis women, trans women and one trans man and, even though we learn little about these people, they feel fiercely alive.
The plan was to film within a real working prison, but Covid derailed that concept and when Arias was ready to shoot once more, she realised that most of her chosen subjects had been released, their sentences complete. But Arias never explains her conceit. Indeed, at first, it appears that Yoseli is really being processed into the incarceration system when she strips for the female prison guards. It’s only the peeling paint of the cell’s walls and the grass growing in the cracks of the exercise yard that show the viewer that what we see is fantasy rather than real life.
What if, in prison, you were allowed to sing and dance as if you were in a modern musical? Would life for the inmates be more tolerable? Here, in this alternative world, arguments about football are settled by vogue battles and dreary institutional corridors are transformed into catwalks reminiscent of New York Ball Culture. The queue to use the prison payphone is the perfect place to break out in song and complaints about the all-seeing guards are rendered into a line dance.
But life inside isn’t all just one party for the prisoners. Yoseli tells the story of her arrest; on her way to Europe, airport security found drugs hidden in her suitcase while another woman reveals that she was sent down for people trafficking when the police discovered she was letting out rooms by the hour to sex workers. Nacho, the trans man, tells his story too. After his conviction for theft from ATMs, he was sent to a trans block in a female prison. Still, he found love there, and his marriage is restaged as a 1950s rock ‘n’ roll sequence. The burgeoning romance between him and the inscrutable Yoseli is a nice touch, adding a glimmer of rom-com to Arias’ movie.
If this lovingly absurd re-enactment of prison life performs any kind of catharsis for the ex-cons, the result is never revealed. Their conversations are scripted and the choreography is well-rehearsed, although only one of the ‘prisoners,’ who learnt how to vogue by watching dancers practise in Buenos Aires parks, seems to have any experience of the Ballroom scene. But the amateurish moves of some of the wardens only make Reas more charming and, strangely for a fantasy, more realistic.
Playing alongside Reas at this year’s BFI Flare Festival is the Austrian short, The Robbers, about three trans women who learn how to be men to pull off a robbery. It’s an ingenious set-up and we can only hope that Isa Schieche will be able to turn her 15-minute film into a feature as there’s great promise here and already a thumping score.
Reas is screening at BFI Flare 2024 running from 13 -24 March.
