Cicada Cinema presents: Anhell69 (2022)

A self-defined trans film, Anhell69 is a genre-busting, transgressive and kaleidoscopic musing on the lives and deaths of a group of queer Colombian twentysomethings.

Neither documentary nor fiction, but somehow of both worlds, Theo Montoya’s feature directorial debut occupies a series of underground, liminal spaces as it follows their attempt to make a sci-fi vampire movie set in a decrepit city where ghosts coexist with the living. Montoya’s intention was to cast their friends and to have the action unfold within Medellin´s underground club and party scene. However, the reality of life for this makeshift cast – from drug-use, disease, poverty and an air of hopelessness, to violence and homo/trans-phobia – ruptures the filmmaker’s intentions. Instead, Anhell69 stands as a powerful and emotionally devastating elegy to many of its protagonists and an allegory of the precarity of life for Colombia´s marginalised.