J. Zambrana | Después de verte (A Sight on You) / 2018

a kiss returned

by Douglas Messerli

 

J. Zambrana (screenwriter and director) Después de verte (A Sight on You) / 2018 [13 minutes]

 

I suggest that a better English title for this short film by Spanish writer and director J. Zambrana might be After Seeing You or The Sight of You instead of the garbled English phrase most sources suggest, A Sight on You.

    In any event the work is a sort of one-liner with regard to what it offers the LGBTQ-interested audience. Basically it’s another example of the several “brotherly love” tales that surprises only because it suddenly appears that the love is not necessarily the one-sided event to appears to be.

     Suddenly Tim’s (Lluís Febrer) older brother Julio (Xavier Batista) arrives home after a year’s absence in military attire. The delighted Tim, who quite clearly idolizes his older sibling can hardly contain his joy. An unseen mother also greets him, but the emphasis in this work is all on the brothers who share a room.

    Tim is innocence personified, busy reading cartoon chronicles on outer space and applying temporary paste-on tattoos. But in the middle of the night everything changes when he awakens to discover his brother in the bathroom.

     Tiptoeing to the bathroom door and peeking through the door crack he observes Julio masturbating, and it is suddenly as if all of his youthful hormones come alive at the very same instant. He can hardly resist putting his own hand upon his cock and he leans back against the wall in an absolute ecstasy of imaginative pleasure.

     The next morning, his entire personality has altered. He can hardly speak to his beloved brother, and rushes off to change clothing the minute his brother comes out to sunbathe. While in the bedroom he briefly fetishes his brother’s military uniform, putting on his military cap and shirt before, when the brother suddenly calls to him, he rushes to put them away.

     The film’s last scene shows him attempting to apply the tattoo, while his legs dangle in the pool. Julio finishes his laps and joins him, despite his disdain of such applications, helping him to apply the image by providing spit as he attempts to smooth out the image.

     Tim emotionally loses control, quickly kissing his brother on the lips, Julio immediately pulling back in shock. A moment a silence crackles between the two as Julio suddenly bends forward and returns the kiss with real passion.

    Things like this happen, perhaps more than we imagine, rarely reported because of the cultural taboo against incest. But, as I have insisted many times in these pages, between brothers or sisters the logic of incest makes absolutely no sense.

     The taboo was established because of the fears of delimiting the gene pools between brother and sisterly love and to outlaw the pedophilic controls of father/daughter and mother/son relationships, although several of the culture’s major literary works such as Oedipus Rex and Phaedra recount just such relationships.

      But the love of brother for brother, sister for sister is not only rather comprehensible, since young people surely spend more time with their siblings than anyone else, but perhaps even a safe outlet for both to explore the beginnings of love and sex. Commonly there is more rivalry and the exploration of sexual differences that distances brothers (and sisters) than any open expression of love. But when such love occurs I see utterly no reason for the utter horror so often displayed by parents and the culture at large. No unwanted babies will come of it, and the sexual exploration might help them both to understand the even greater hatred they will surely meet for same sex desires outside the family unit.

     And, in any event, it clearly remains a subject of fascination for gay filmmaking as several essays scattered through these volumes attest.

 

Los Angeles, February 5, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).