Bruising for Besos

In this beautifully shot love story, Yoli is a seductive queer xicana artist who finds great passion with Daña, an alluring Puerto Rican nurse. But their growing intimacy stirs up their own troubled histories. Can Yoli break the cycle, face the past, and create something new for herself?

Writer-director Adelina Anthony plays Yoli, a budding artist who has finally pieced together a new familia of friends in the queer and trans people-of-color community in LA. But her solid foundation, a boring job and a home with her best bud Rani (performance artist D’Lo), is rocked when she and Daña get together and get serious. Yoli makes marionette puppets of her family and contemplates using them to win an animation contest. For now, though, the puppets help her order her private memories of love and longing and the trauma she fled. Anthony deftly intercuts these marionette sequences delineating the family history with the progress of Yoli and Daña’s volatile relationship. As intimacy and connection deepen, the domestic violence that Yoli escaped, or thought she had, comes to the surface. New emotions also bring to light the deep inner conflict that Daña suffers as a closeted lesbian, good nurse and daughter, and devout Catholic. As their feelings grow, the danger of trusting each other amplifies. Yoli ultimately has a choice to heal or to forever be a puppet on a string.

— Carol Harada

No trailer...there was a trailer but it has since disappeared!