Lost Queens

Rodrigo is eighteen and works nights as a drag performer at a club in Chile. When the police raid the venue with television cameras in tow, he is arrested on camera, and the footage is headed for the evening news. Released, he heads home with a single dread: that his family will see him before he has had a chance to explain who he is. Director Ignacio Juricic Merillán draws on a real 1996 raid on a Chilean gay nightclub for this tense, naturalistic short, known in Spanish as Locas perdidas, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it took second prize in the Cinéfondation competition and received the Queer Palm. Andrew Bargsted anchors the film as Rodrigo, with Roxana Campos and Rodrigo Pérez as the family waiting at home. Claustrophobic sound design and a patient camera turn a young man's walk home into a study of fear, shame, and the institutional persecution queer Chileans faced not so long ago.