;)
Latin American storytelling at TIFF wasn’t just about great feats of actress-ing, as I explored in part one of this miniseries within the broader festival coverage. Another common thread found between several projects was an exploration of queerness in its many forms. From an Irish studio's attempt to honor a Dominican child’s journey of self-discovery to a French-Haitian tale of sexual liberation from the chains of Christian fundamentalism, the Toronto program had much to offer in matters of LGBTQIA+ representation. Honestly, having landed in Portugal from Canada and immediately jumped into covering Queer Lisboa for a local outlet, these ideas kept percolating in my mind, bolstered by such films as this year’s Queer Lion winner, the Brazilian provocation that is London, which I might need to find a way to write about before the fall festival season is over for good.
Alas, tonight, let me recommend you Sharon Kleinberg’s I Am Mario, Louise Bagnall’s Julián, Gessica Généus’ Marie Madeleine, and Joaquín Ruano’s Nosotros…
I AM MARIO, Sharon Kleinberg
Few would glance at Mario, a soft-spoken taxi driver doing the rounds in a Mexican metropolis, and see anything but a man. He lives as one, having transitioned eons ago, to the point that nobody in his social and professional circle even seems aware that he was assigned female at birth. His family is mostly accepting, though there are degrees to their enthusiasm and, indeed, their understanding. For every ride-or-die sister, there’s a maternal figure who means well but often says the wrong thing. Whatever the case, Mario passes. But he’s still not done with his transition, discussing plans for bottom surgery with his doctors and changing his hormonal intake as a consequence of that. And that’s when it happens.
As the camera considers Oustin de Léon’s Mario, his loneliness feels much more foregrounded than whatever internal conflicts he might still have about gender identity. That same sentiment is what drives him to get drunk with a colleague one night, practicing rituals of masculinity that transgress into the shadows, and a quick bathroom fuck both men seem to regret when dawn comes. Not that Mario can out the ordeal behind him, out of sight and out of mind. Not when his body changes, fecund with life and a possibility of fatherhood that also brings with it an avalanche of dysphoria. Oh, and did I mention that, as all this is unraveling, he finally finds a badass tattoo artist girlfriend who he might want to share his life with, but for the fact that she doesn’t want children? Not the best of times to announce a pregnancy.
Emotionally, just at the level of one’s stormy heart, I Am Mario portrays a situation whose complexity is hard to grasp in its fullest yet seems perfectly observed by Kleinberg and her team. There’s not much to be said about the mise-en-scène or even the narrative as far as structure, rhythm, or basic propulsion is concerned – this is derivative social realism for the most part. Still, I Am Mario reverberates with keen insight and a sense of acute authenticity, suggesting societal pressures and systemic failures toward the trans community without losing sight of its fundamental shape as a character study. And in that regard, it rarely disappoints. It’s revealing in ways I couldn’t have anticipated, always honest and open-hearted, including when it hurts most, and one had to rethink what a happy ending might look like for a man in Mario’s position.
JULIÁN, Louise Bagnall
Maybe Cartoon Saloon should remain in its narrow little milieu of Irish folklore, for their projects that stray beyond that always seem a bit… less. Not that Louise Bagnall’s adaptation of Jessica Love’s Julián is a Mermaid is without merit. Quite the opposite, in fact. It might even improve on the original text, with an adaptation by Dominican genderqueer writer Juliany Taveras that feels closer to its subjects than the picture book, thornier in its explorations of how gender intersects with cultural identity within an immigrant context. All that without betraying the quintessential innocence of a child’s perspective as they discover themselves during an eventful summer spent with grandma in the heart of Brooklyn’s Caribbean community. Intergenerational conflict abounds, as does the tension between Anglophone assimilation and a Spanish-language refutation of such erasures.
But there’s also the hyper-fixation of a kid who lets their passions move them through the world, dreams of mermaids and marine life coming to the surface, summoning crayon fish from drawings and the boundless imagination of the young, blurring the lines dividing sleep and waking life. Glorious folly is contrasted with a well-observed portrait of a specific time and place, an urban Afro-Latinx community with its own traditions accrued over time and the amalgamation of heterogeneous heritage. Placing the film’s aesthetic in Julián’s own artistic expression, however rudimentary, helps justify much of the bluntness in character design and the simplification of mundane detail. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to compare the style to Cartoon Saloon’s previous, graphic-rich, Celtic-inspired triumphs, or to the original kids’ book, whose drawings are more sophisticated but less innately inviting.
I guess one thing Julián has over other films of the same ilk is its refusal to reduce the titular character’s queerness to an allegory. There are no Elio or Luca-like sublimations to appeal to a more general audience. Instead, this film cares about the specificities of queer childhood, respecting the process of finding oneself to the point that it can accommodate a reticence where lesser films would put a period. Still, the main familial conflict feels a bit pat and is resolved too swiftly by the end, even as Julián’s internal odyssey continues beyond the narrative's boundaries and the gender binary alike. Alas, when most mainstream fare runs longer than it should, you can’t fault a studio picture for brevity.
MARIE MADELEINE, Gessica Généus
Ostensibly inspired by the Biblical figure of Mary Magdalene, Gessica Généus’ latest feature feels equally indebted to The Harvey Girls when it comes to its premise. Swap the Wild West of that Judy Garland musical for Jacmel, Haiti, and you get a similar predicament: wholesomeness sharing space with depravity, right on the other side of the street. Marie Madeleine is a sex worker who walks the night in a bright red wig, a synthetic flame that follows her inside the abode of her brothel, a house of much garishness and no shame, ornate and kitsch, desire dripping from every surface. And right on her doorstep, just across the road, a harsh preacher has set up shop, clamoring against sin while his son’s eye wanders. He’s Joseph, a gentle young man who’s always at the ready with a gesture of unexpected grace and generosity, timorous though he might seem at first glance.
If the patriarch is fire and brimstone made flesh, the younger man is the more welcoming side of faith. One ready to be pulled into the world of free love inside the market of flesh, its promises of transgression and freedom and stylistic ruptures into a magical realism that’s altogether at odds with the elegiac docudrama way Généus shoots the world outside Marie Madeleine’s influence. She’s no temptress, however, just a safeguard from judgment and expectations, a weary yet bright woman whose life is marked by exploitation but who, like Joseph, still seems to preserve an essential goodness about her. It’s in Généus’ work as her own title character and Béonard Monteau’s performance. It also lives in the flux of memories from both Marie and Joseph, which sometimes makes the film feel ungoverned, like a runaway train about to derail.
Marie Madeleine feels chemically unstable in that way, a photograph “ruined” in the lab when sunlight slashes through it. Yet it’s hard to deny the visual vitality in these passages and others, their sheer power to move and spellbind. As queerness inches into his life, Joseph blossoms, and the film’s photographic experimentation does the same. However, violence threatens to burst his bliss. A carnival offers hope, a patriarch’s anger takes it away. All while Généus interweaves a meditation on the value of hedonism as resistance, on sex as both degradation and self-possession, on Haiti as a postcolonial land of possibility, still bearing the scars of oppression and the fanaticism of those who preach love but practice hate. Freedom is fearlessness, so Marie Madeleine claims via Nina Simone, defiant to the bitter end, facing a cruel world with her head held high, even as tears paint silver trails down her cheek. I believe her. Do you?
NOSOTROS, Joaquín Ruano
It’s a sad state of affairs when, even in the year 2026, so many of the queer stories being told can still be described as tragedies. Such is the case of Joaquín Ruano’s Nosotros, though one shouldn’t let pain override pleasure or fade away the memory of love. If we are to suffer, let us do it in the knowledge that we also thrived and shone, bright like the sun, if only for the moment it takes for a candle’s flame to be snuffed out into nothingness. Let’s celebrate the beauty, elegiac as it might be, that Ruano finds in his characters’ lives, starting with the day-to-day drudgery of a Guatemalan young man who lives in the middle of nowhere, cradled in the bosom of a weeping rurality and his Indigenous community. DP Paolo Giron paints with light like an old master, and there’s a studied unhurriedness to César Díaz’s cutting that’s more engaging than it might sound thus described, almost hypnotic.
Romero has settled into a rut in the backwoods, a serene quotidian with his wife and child, yet unfulfilled and always feeling the weight of poverty bearing down on him. When a local gang threatens this precarious situation further, he flees to the metropolis and gains employment at a rundown mall, settling into a new kind of inertia that’s still modulated by Ruano’s lyrical take on realist tropes. In that temple of commerce, exploitation and whatnot, a hopeless place if there has ever been one, Romero finds a new love in Nubia, a local businesswoman who happens to be trans, though that doesn’t seem of much concern to our leading man. Neither a fetishist nor a bigot, he’s simply pulled toward her and the private paradise they find in each other’s company. Outcasts, the both of them, together they’re somehow at peace.
At 78 minutes, Nosotros moves languidly through a simple tale bound to end with prejudice affirming itself over those who want to live outside mainstream society. But there’s much to consider, even in the manifestation of horror and loss, for Ruano rarely takes the approach we might expect from a narrative so awfully ripe for melodrama. Rites of sex and washing can feel both intimate and almost theatrical, bound by the visual codes of realism while an anti-naturalistic dissonance in performance hints at curious contradictions. The same happens when grief must be performed, or when ostracization is met with an unflinching gaze rather than the wet sorrow one might expect. In that, Lola Vásquez’s Nubia reminded me of Irene Papas in her Mihalis Kakogiannis films, a figure of Ancient Tragedy transported to our modern world, living through the same story that has echoed over centuries, of love denied and norms that are against our essential humanity and push us ever closer to the abyss.
As a Cartoon Saloon project, Julián is the likeliest of these four to find distribution and make its way to US cinemas sometime soon. But keep an eye out for I Am Mario, Marie Madeleine and Nosotros. They’re cinematic gems well worth your time.