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The young Valeria Sarmiento made her first short documentary film amidst the political turmoil of 1970s Chile, opening up new possibilities in the cinematic landscape of the moment, which had been largely focused on the politics of the country’s class struggle. With singular aesthetic and thematic freedom, her ten-minute film focuses on questions of gender and makes the invisible visible, painting an intimate portrait of women strippers in the most famous clubs in Santiago. These women emancipated themselves from situations of domestic violence and worked strenuously to maintain their jobs, longing for their children to have easier professional situations and lives. The film was never released as a result of the 1973 coup, and its raw footage was exiled to France, where it was lost and unedited. In 2021, the negatives were found and restored. Fifty years after its production, viewers can finally appreciate the first work of one of the first major filmmakers in Latin American cinema.

When the Argentinian dictatorship ended in the early 1980s, the countercultural scene flourished like never before. In Córdoba, a conservative and Catholic city, drag performers La Delpi, La Colo and la Gallega began the group Las Kalas, which performed their musical cover show every weekend at La Piaf, one of the oldest gay clubs in Argentina. For the LGBT community, there was an idyllic world in the friendly intimacy of La Piaf, but outside of the club’s protective walls, the police continued violently targeting them, and the HIV pandemic was wreaking havoc, proliferating without any available treatments. After using VHS archives in her first feature, Silence is a Falling Body (2017), Agustina Comedi continued working with them for this film, combining the artifacts with fictional recreations to innovatively depict communal memory, remember a past that never was, and film a future that could have been different.