performing their deaths
by Douglas Messerli
Agustina Comedi (screenwriter and director) Ensayo
de una despedida (Playback) / 2019 [14 minutes]
Argentinian director Agustina Comedi’s 2019
short film Playback takes us back to the city Córdoba in the late 1980s
when, for a brief period of time a group of transgender women and men
in drag, performing in a local bar begin to
die of AIDS.
With little public support in the Roman Catholic and conservative community
the small group of performers banned together as Grupo Kalas, performing and
giving over their ticket sales to a local hospital for AIDS. Adorned in
self-made gowns and lip-synching their music in a cell these women, La Delpi
now being only remaining living member, created a community that worked to help
the large gay community and themselves as, so to speak, lay dying and suffering
from police raids.
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As this short documentary reveals, there are still far too few such evidences
of and witnessing to LGBTQ+ history necessary to comprehend all the love and
sacrifices that were made by queers who faced sometimes nearly impossible odds
simply in order to survive and share their love with one another.
As one their group puts it, “We gave ourselves awards, because if we
didn’t who else would?”
Los Angeles, February 16, 2024
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(February 2024).
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