a new alternative to the gay blues
by Douglas Messerli
Cláudio Márcio and Wagner Cafe
(screenplay), Cláudio Márcio (director) Panteras Pink (Pink Panthers)
/ 2024, general release 2025 [25 minutes]
The Brazilian short film Pink
Panthers is the kind of feel-good movie that the LGBTQ+ community has now
been producing at a brisk rate. There is certainly nothing objectionable about
showing how to defeat bulling and abuse, as this film purports to do; but the
solution it proposes is about as meaningless and ineffective as suggesting that
all a young gay man needs to do is find some sport in which he excels, get
together a team, and publicly announce his sexuality and everything will turn
out all right.
The abused boy, in this case, is Edinho (Thales Barbosa), who is not
only regularly beaten up my local peers not only for being obviously gay, but
for being, in a still quite racist Brazil, black, of mixed Spanish and black
heritage, the black mother Carmen (Meibe Rodrigues) having long ago abandoned
the father who also regularly abused his gay son.
She is a loving and protecting mother, but also dreadfully worried about
her son’s state of mind as he increasingly comes home after having been beaten
by other straight boys with whom, along with his friend Jackson (Tiago Agar)
and his female friend Luana (Nayra de Paula), he tries to engage in dodgeball games.
The three of them are champions at this particular sport; yet every win ends in
another black eye for our unhappy friend.
Despondent, Edinho scrolls down his cellphone on a site where he is told
that hundreds of his fellow Brazilian queers are killed every year, and that
the average life expectancy in Brazil for a gay boy is only 35.
It’s enough to make any gay boy cry, which Edinho does quite regularly
in this film. That is, until he discovers the “gaymada” groups, gay organized
tournaments of dodgeball and other sports. He gets the wonderful idea of
creating his own league, and with his friends he creates posters he plasters
throughout his small town, despite even an encounter with his still angry
father who furiously confronts his son for advertising his sexuality.
For the first time in his life Edinho stands up to the man who had
regularly beaten him as a child, denying having any relationship with or need
to listen to the man who delivered up so much pain and sorrow to him and his
mother.
One of the first people to visit Edinho about the new team is Cassio
(Paulo Victor) who has been among the boys who most recently beat him. He apologizes,
expressing the fact that he has not come out as gay and hopes to work out with
Edinho to join his gay team. Before long we witness the two making out, a new
bond having been formed, obviously one of the benefits of Edinho finally having
found a positive way to express his sexuality.
On the day of the match, the three teammates show up in the court to
find no one else there, and for a moment feel like their attempts at finding a
new community have failed; but soon after Cassio appears, along with several
others. The game is on. And even Carmen shows up with a new ball for her son
and his friends to play with; is there some significance in the fact that it is
baby blue in color?
It doesn’t matter, of course, who wins, all are winners as they hug one
another in joy for having now created a new outlet for their attempts to
communicate with a larger world.
This is what you can only describe as a very nice film, without much real
logic or reality behind it. If only gay men and women could find such an easy
solution to their sorrows. You might say that this film, at best, is a bit
delusional. But then perhaps I have read too many films of gay difficulties around
the world and have become far more cynical than I want to be.
Los Angeles, April 30, 2026
Reprinted from My Gay Cinema blog
(April 2026).
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