Kevin Rios | Made of Sugar / 2016

garden of eden

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kevin Rios (screenplay and director) Made of Sugar / 2016 [6 minutes]

 

This short film made by USA immigrant from Cuba, begins with home film documentation from the director’s own family movies, backed up with a narrative voice that declares “No one willingly left my country…Because the island was marvelous, a truly blessed land. It was gorgeous, bright, it was like the Garden of Eden!”

    The cut-out animated images, however, tell a slightly different story, as the butterflies and other insects, who evidently love sugar, eat away portions of the “Mom and Pop” story. We hear new reports of changes in US relationships with Cuba, and the fact that Cuban cigars will again be allowed to be imported.

      And then, a far different kind of telephone message: “Hi baby,” obviously a mother calling her son now in New York City. And almost immediately we see him and his friends, and the word Friday laid out on a table made up of cocaine, quickly snuffed up by the partyers, the other days following one by one.

     The mother’s voice claims to know why he’s not calling: he has a girlfriend. We see Tuesday also spelled out in cocaine that disappears up the nose just as quickly. The son, we observe, is engaged in modern dance movements. And another figure of this film, puts lipstick upon his lips. Clearly things are very different in New York from wherever the mother is calling from, the Cuban community in Miami we presume. “It’s hard,” she concludes, but I know I have to let you live your life.”

       In a series of quick frames, we see actors Victor Borbolla, Stephen Chacon, Andrew Herbert, and others, kiss, engage in a drag show, and snort more cocaine.

       The final scene consists of a long telephone call, the central figure’s call-back to his mother, on an answering machine, where he explains that he’s taken several dance classes and he’s now working a real dancing jobs, while insisting that it hasn’t had any effect on his other classes or his graduating on time. As she works in her garden, puts clothes on the line, etc., with hear his further comments that he’s met a lot of nice people who accept him for who he is.

      No, he doesn’t have a girlfriend, but he has met someone he thinks she might very much like. He hopes she’s no longer smoking (we see an ashtray filled with butts), and he states emphatically that he misses her and the dogs, and can’t wait to see her.

      The clever emblems of family and life, meanwhile, get crunched up by consumer insects, but blossom again into flowers and other representations of family, sharing, and life.

     Both mother and son know there is no real way they can return to the same world they once shared, but still hold one another in deep love, affection, and respect. But the ravines between them are larger perhaps than the Appalachian Mountain Range that runs from North to South from Newfoundland, Canada to Alabama, separating the far eastern cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. from the cities on the western edge of the range such as Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Nashville, far longer that the few nautical miles from Miami to Cuba.

     The son with whom this Cuban-born mother will eventually share a reunion is now fully a gay     American—whatever that possibly means these days.

 

Los Angeles, August 28, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (August 2024).