Carlos Castro | Acá Arriba (Up Here) / 2025

looking at the stars

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carlos Castro (screenwriter and director) Acá Arriba (Up Here) / 2025 [19 minutes]

 

Young Venecio (Suan Lugo) is from a home that, although both his mother and father have stayed together, has long been a broken family, the boy always seeking for the shining eyes of his father which his grandmother insists her own mother long ago fell in love with. He can see no glow in his own father’s eyes, and clearly little love.

     Venecio has recently broken up with his boyfriend, apparently also without the beautiful eyes he has been seeking, and is not exploring meetup dates in the bathroom of a local bar with basically thugs, who force him to suck them off before turning him around and fucking him in the bathroom stall.

     Back in the bar, Venecio sits drinking hardly daring to stare around the almost empty space. But suddenly one young handsome man appears, encouraging him to play a game of pool. Although he recognizes the regular customer Venecio, the boy, who he claims never turned before even turned around to observe his glance. Venecio, pretending to not know the least about pool demands he teach him out to play, insisting that if he should miraculously win the game he has to buy his drinks, of which there are multiple, including a bottle of what appears to be gin.

    Actually, he’s quite a capable player, and soon his new acquaintance X (Brian Sosa) suggests they stop playing the game, and join him, certainly better than the bathroom fare he’s been meeting up with, just to be a friend for the night.

     X (for Xavier we soon find out), takes him to the top of a building where his father and friends used to escape to from their families. There, under the stars, Venecio reveals his life to his new acquaintance, and is also stunned by all the stars in the sky which he as so long ignored in his attempts just to move forward day by day.

     X is somewhat of a beautiful dreamer, while recognizing that sex is one of the great pleasures of life, suggesting that the stars are far more important and significant in their meaning, reminding him that some of them might be larger than the sun.

     The two young men find joy in each other, falling flat on the backs face to face in what we are sure will end up as a sexual moment. But when Venecio suggests that X might kiss him and moves in to make the kiss himself, X argues that he promised just to be a friend for this night, not a lover.

We realize this is not a sudden homophobic move, but simply a gesture of true caring from him regarding the young Venecio who has so long been abused in love-making.

    A bit hurt, Venecio, sits up and drinks from his bottle of gin, and we are at first fearful that he might bolt. But he asks a far more important question which shows that perhaps he has learned something on this special night “up here,” closer to the stars than the underworld in which he has spent his entire life: “Could you be my friend for more than one night?”

     This Puerto Rican film by Carlos Castro is a truly moving and lovely movie about gay men, which takes it someone out the normal sexual route and takes us into another world of male gay relationships, that echoes, in part, Oscar Wilde’s famous witticism from his play, Lady Windermere’s Fan: “We may all be in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

 

Los Angeles, October 18, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2026).