Raw Session

A Brazilian collective of cross-dresser, transgender and non-binary friends filmed themselves in 2018 with a Mini DV camera, spontaneously and with little preparation. Four years later, the collective, As Talavistas & ela.ltda, edited the raw material to create a succession of prologues to a film that, as they say themselves, is continually in progress.

The result so far is a playful, personal, political and uncompromising self-portrait. The friends, all multiracial and thus doubly marginalized, talk frankly about themselves and the issues they struggle with, in a society that poses a constant danger to trans people. Brazil has the highest murder rate of transgender people in the world.

One of the friends says they feel they are “in a place that isn’t mine, in a role that isn’t mine.” They lead a clandestine life, off the beaten track, and refuse to participate in “imitating and serving a white masculinity.” The form of this film is also boundless and inventive, a flood of images and bright color filters—Raw Session is a film that transgresses boundaries in more than one way.