Two-Spirit & Ultraviolette and the Blood-Spitters Gang

Programme

• Two-Spirit (Mónica Taboada-Tapia, CO 2021) (16 min.)

  A transgender woman in a small indigenous community in Colombia, Georgina counters the hostility directed at her with the words, “I have only love.”

  First there is sound—more of a soundscape than music, brightened by birdsong—then the contours of Georgina’s house appear against the blue of the early morning. The camera zooms in on details of her body while she prepares for a new day.

  Georgina arrived in this small indigenous community in northern Colombia more than a decade ago. A trans woman, she couldn’t count on any understanding from her new neighbors. In short, she was an unwelcome stranger. And after all these years she still is. The camera follows her as she approaches some fellow villagers, asks them in a friendly manner how they are, and is subjected to open mockery.

  Georgina’s feelings of humiliation and isolation become palpable in carefully framed observations of her daily life and splendid metaphorical landscape shots, while she shares her thoughts in the voiceover. She counters the hostility surrounding her with the words “I have only love,” and they hit home like a sledgehammer.

• Ultraviolette and the Blood-Spitters Gang (Robin Hunzinger, FR 2021) (74 min.)

  The passionate letters that a girl called Marcelle wrote to her childhood sweetheart from a sanatorium during the interwar period evoke the image of a rebel, way ahead of her time, who goes her own way with a group of kindred spirits.

  After the death of his grandmother Emma, Robin Hunzinger and his mother Claudie find a carefully preserved collection of letters which Emma received from a girl called Marcelle. In the 1920s, Emma and Marcelle met at school in Dijon. Secretly, love blossomed between the two teenage girls, but after two years they parted ways. Marcelle developed tuberculosis and was admitted to a sanatorium, where her letters to Emma became increasingly fervent and desperate, and her rebellious behavior aroused the attentions of three other seriously ill young women.

  Complementing the sparse photographs of the women, Hunzinger combines archive footage, avant-garde films, and music to create a sensuous, poetic atmosphere. The voiceover quotes from the eloquent letters of Marcelle, a daring young woman ahead of her time, who rejects adult life with its coarseness and restrictions, and goes her own way with a group of kindred spirits.