Eliane Raheb’s documentary Miguel’s War is based on impressions, and how to construct a life around hiding the past. Based on a chance encounter the filmmaker had with a gay man in Barcelona, the film retraces his past and reconstructs the identity he had created for himself under the name Miguel Alonso. The film is a triptych of three identities. There is Michel, his birth name, Miguel, the name he took on once in Spain, and Barcelona, where the film makeshim part of the city. However, there is a fourth title card, one that reads “Love, Only Love”. This ending is a spiritual one, where a gay man is given pride in a church, being the one who is worshipped for who he is.
What’s particularly striking is how casual the interaction between filmmaker and subject is. It’s not a passive pity party sort of story, where we are manipulated to feel empathy. Instead, it’s conversational, probing and challenging. The two get angry at each other, they’ll bicker, and we hear that come through. Even though this resembles an Almodovar scrapbook collage in places, it’s never fantasized, and Miguel is never deified for the sake of a non-queer audience’s viewing simplicity. It’s refreshing that we get to see a gay man’s story laid out like this where he’s still allowed to be mean at times, it’s what makes the film feel more human.
What makes Miguel’s War standout is that it isn’t trauma-dumping in a vacuum. Lebanon’s civil war is very much a collective national trauma, and the immersiveness of the conversation around fleeing Lebanon to start fresh in Spain as a gay man, without the religious trauma that comes with Beirut’s Christian militia brings us into Miguel’s psyche. Spain isn’t shown as a pure saving grace, and though its world is brought to life with drag queens and colorful animation, in his new identity, he hasn’t left behind his past entirely, and says he still feels he has never been able to fully experience love.
By inserting herself into the film in the role that feels like a prodding therapist to a resistant (though willing) client, Raheb carefully toes the line of avoiding making this a film about herself. It acts as a dialogue between the two on their experiences in wartime, and she even casts her own mother in a role for some recreated sequences. In a way, both she and Miguel direct, as it is the subject who says cut on film, and all the typically removed moments, asking for consent to shoot, or struggling to find an easy way to tell the story, are left in. It’s a transparency that creates honesty, as it’s not always the story, but how, and how easily, it can be articulated from memory.
In 1999, Gendernauts, German filmmaker Monika Treut’s portrait of an FTM, was one of few honest depictions of trans men on screen. Today, that fact is very much the same. A lesbian herself. Treut has become a sort of queer underground world tourist with her camera, from German kink communities in Seduction: The Cruel Woman to the Taiwanese culinary world in The Raw and the Cooked. Her newest film, Genderation, is a sort of 7Up series with trans San Francisco, catching up with the individuals met in Gendernauts twenty-two years later.
While we do meet the trans men from before a second time, the clearer change chronicled is the gentrification of the city. What was once a sort of queer paradise, livable at cheaper prices, is liberalized and made unaffordable, over-policed in Trump-era America. The technology industry has taken over much of the vibrant LGBTQ culture and arts scene there, leaving many of them bitter over twenty years later. Interviewed in both films, The Testosterone Files author Max Wolf Valeiro, who identifies himself as transmasculine, has become embittered with the assimilationist idea of trying to change societal views of gender, viewing his own transition as an act of radical individualism.
Many of the trans interviewees are wary of the wave of societal attention, and miss the thriving queer underground in the city that became a safe haven before the corporate approved ideas of pride. They are still the heart of the film, even with higher profile conversations with sex-worker personality Annie Sprinkle, and these segments with cisgender community personas dilute the film. Contrary to the ideas openly preached today, the film is a bog advocate for the idea of trans community of a form of family, and non-conformist queer culture. It’s a shame more of Treut’s work isn’t accessible, as I’m ashamed this is my first film of hers as a wannabe lesbian film historian.
Often drifting from narrative, Henrika Kull’s sophomore feature film Bliss is a love story told almost entirely through brief moments of intimacy. Set in a brothel, Maria (Searching Eva’s Adam Hoya) is an Italian newcomer who meets the much older Sascha (Katharina Behrens), and falls in love. Their contrasting backgrounds spark a romance, originally built on the scattered euphoria of nights between hotel rooms together. However, their relationship soon dries out, strained by the men they work with, and the outskirts and disapproving eyes of Berlin. The film is adamantly pro-sex-worker, and pro-normalization of it.
The problem is the film is almost too non-narrative for its own good. For a fairly traditional arc of a relationship waxing and waning, it’s hard to piece together story beats we need to when we have in-and-out shots of physicality tied together by short, feisty conversations.
What is impressive is how respectfully cinematographer Carolina Steinbrecher films what could easily feel pornographic. A respectful gaze doesn’t lose the eroticism of an inherently sex-positive film, but it doesn’t fall into the trap of love between women shown intentionally for a male eye. Still, this feels like one of those European art films where a main character’s messiness is meant to make up for a lack of story or clear message.
