[WQ40] I Will Be There Every Single Night [2024-04-08]

[hermionesviolin]

US PREMIERE
I WILL BE THERE EVERY SINGLE NIGHT
TODA NOITE ESTAREI LÁ
Monday Apr 8 @ 6:30 pm
Brattle Theater

Barred from attending her religious service, Mel does not give up professing her faith. Every night, she prepares posters and takes them to the church door, waiting for the day she will be able to walk inside again. Over the span of a far-right government and the hardships of an unforeseen pandemic, the documentary follows the transsexual hairdresser's struggle to assert her constitutional right to religious freedom. A poignant portrait of a character and a country in its far from ordinary complexities

This film is presented in Portuguese with English subtitles.

WQ: "In this Brazilian film, despite being barred from attending her religious service, Mel does not give up professing her faith. Every night, she prepares posters and takes them to the church door, waiting for the day she will be able to walk inside again. This documentary is a accurate testament to the agency and tenacity of the LGBTQ+ community."

I had somehow missed that it's a documentary when we were first picking movies, so I spent a lot of the movie being like, "The historical events happening around her are clearly real, but I think she's fictitious?"  (It takes place over about 2017-2020.)

She wants to attend a particular Assemblies of God church, and displays a kind of religiosity we don't usually see in trans people.  She's very a lot ("even for a trans girl," Abby said).

I appreciated that her lawyer seems totally on her side -- it doesn't feel like a battle of her against the world.

I appreciated that Mel wears pants sometimes.  I don't know what Brazilian culture is like -- and given her more conservative religious beliefs, I wouldn't have been at all surprised if she chose to present more stereotypically feminine all of the time.  But she's just a woman -- who happens to be barred from attending a particular church and is filing court cases because this violates her constitutional rights.

***

Presented with…

Flores del otro Patio
[director] Jorge Cadena • Colombia • Spanish • 15min

In the north of Colombia, a group of queer activists use extravagant performative actions to denounce the disastrous exploitation by the country’s largest coal mine.

The costuming here is really cool.

There was definitely a scene where I was a little unsure how much people were using actual magic versus just performing -- which I think was intentional; the filming of the performative actions purposely pull the viewer out of the realm of the realistic to a degree.