Anhell69 review an impassioned eulogy for Colombia's queer renegades

"The best kind of goth is the Latino goth. That much is clear throughout this documentary lament for the Colombian city of Medellin, for which director Theo Montoya narrates his elegy from within a casket. Luckily, he is still alive unlike eight of the doomy-looking LGBTQ+ renegades who speak about their lives on camera here, having killed themselves or died of drug overdoses since filming."

"Partly constructed out of audition interviews with actor hopefuls, Anhell69 is the remnant of Montoya's unfinished movie, of which we see extracts: it takes place in a dystopian Medellin in which the preponderance of the dead and a lack of cemetery space has led to red-eyed phantoms walking the streets. These revenants also enjoy horny hookups with living humans, an outbreak of spectrophilia that the authorities crack down on."

"Collaging his abandoned film, candid insights from his queer comrades, rapturous goth-rave sequences, protest footage and galactic-looking Medellin cityscapes, Montoya hopes this amounts to a cinema of unbelievers (inspired by Colombian neorealist Victor Gaviria, who cameos here as a taxi driver). But his ambitions go even further: he aspires to make work that is truly transgressive, crossing boundaries as fluidly as his spectrophiliac squad break gender lines."

The film centers on Medellin's Latino goth scene, narrated from inside a casket while eight queer participants later died by suicide or overdose. The deaths connect to ambient socio-cultural violence lingering from cartel-era trauma. Anhell69 is the remnant of an unfinished movie set in a dystopian Medellin where cemetery shortages produce red-eyed phantoms who engage in spectrophilia that authorities suppress. The phantasmic plot serves as a camp metaphor for daily disdain and harassment of the city's LGBTQ+ population. Montoya collages auditions, queer testimonies, rave sequences, protests and cityscapes, modeling his approach on Victor Gaviria while aiming for transgressive, boundary-crossing cinema, though some ambitions feel banal and the radical project seems uncertain.

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