Casa Roshell

You’d never know this is your home away from home. The surveillance camera outside shows a drab reception area and an unremarkable street in Mexico City; inside, the lights flash, but the tables are empty. Yet preparations are soon underway and fixed categories cease to apply: stubble is removed, make-up applied and strands of hair are teased into place; the camera is trained not on the men themselves, but what they see in the mirror. There’s time for a lesson before the festivities get going, to practise walking, consider the letters of the alphabet, think about what sort of girl to be.

Music plays, drinks are served and the last boundaries are suspended: those between man and woman, gay, straight and bi, past and present, reality and fiction. The people chatting at the tables or waiting before the darkroom are shot to resemble characters from a film, impossibly glamourous, which doesn’t mean their stories aren’t true. Whenever film stock replaces the digital images, it’s like a symbol for the memories Casa Roshell contains, the spectres of all those who came here and no longer felt alone. No matter how small the utopia, the world outside can still catch up.

Ubicada en la Ciudad de México, Casa Roshell es un espacio utópico, una especie de refugio para aquellos hombres que vive reprimidos en sus deseos de feminización y travestismo. A lo largo de una noche, y a partir de íntimas viñetas, esta plelíucla nos conduce a través de los sueños y la búsqueda de identidad de una serie de personajes transgresores. Entre charlas, música, miradas e incluso performances, el segundo largometraje de Camila José Donoso ofrece un discurso de tono existencialista en torno a la dualidad de géneros y los deseos más innatos de las protagonistas, quienes también viven una parte de su realidad como hombres biológicos. 

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