“Between queens”, or the demands of society | Male Fainsod Documentary

Among queens – 6 points

(Argentina, 2024)

Direction and script: Male Fainsod.

Co-direction: Tomas Morelli.

Script: Male Fainsod and Tomás Morelli.

Duration: 61 minutes.

Premiere exclusively in Cosmos cinema.

Near the end of between queenshe documentary by debutant Male Fainsod co-directed by Tomás Morelli, The director takes a trip from the Buenos Aires coast to Buenos Aires with her sister, her mother and her grandmother. On the route, they discuss what the title of the film could be and, after considering various possibilities – the very extensive, the overly elaborate, the ridiculous – the talk finally leads to the final name. Ostensible documentary of the self (although that first person is not singular, but polyphonic), Fainsod does not appear on screen until those final moments, but his voice-over runs through the sixty minutes of footage, from start to finish. The specific clipping of the director’s childhood and adolescence in Catamarca is marked by a memory: the election of the Spring Queen during the last year of high school, tradition of provinces that, at least until about three decades ago, continued to mark the end of the school term.

The meeting with her group of friends from that time triggers the interviews and ideas. Why did they participate in that? competition clearly anachronistic in which a group of teachers and other adults chose the nicest and prettiest, among other superficial boxes to check, including that of the “philandering”? The fact that Fainsod got off the catwalk at the last minute, filming her companions with a camera, marks a observational distance which the documentary now highlights again, although in a more conscious and comprehensive plan.

The memory of his grandmother, a lifelong resident of San Clemente and winner of a similar contest in the early 1960s, provides an axis of continuity and intertwines three generations of women. “I was fourteen years old and up there, with everyone looking at me, I felt very exposed, uncomfortable”says the lady while turning the pages of a photo album that has her as the exclusive protagonist.

From that family lineage and customs in which the concept of beauty is the predominant axis, between queens It doesn’t move away from the micro but illuminate the macro: the obsession with the body and the look of others, diets to lose weight, childhood teasing and adult comments about sizes, shapes and kilos, the discomfort and pain when faced with the demand to look skinny and pretty. “What seemed to be a personal search became a collective story about our desires, our bodies, our decisions,” says the director in the intention notes for the film, which was screened last year at the Mar del Plata Festival. A small film but not without ambition that, fortunately, never adheres strictly to the agenda of political correctness to expose the chiaroscuro of the themes that run through it.