John Cameron Mitchell on 25 years of Hedwig, plus Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

But I caught, um, La Bolga Negra yesterday.

I'm probably pronouncing that horribly.

But this is a, a Spanish film that I think shared a directorial prize at Cannes.

Um-

Mm

...

it is this big kind of epic, sort of across the ages, different parallel storytelling, all with a very strong queer theme.

There's two stories playing out in the 1930s, and then there's a contemporary story.

So we have one guy who's just been, he's kind of been caught up in the fascist movement in '30s, um, Spain.

Um, although he's sort of gorgeously naive.

Like, he's sort of, it just seems the thing to do, and he falls in love with a, one of his prisoners.

Then we have ano- another character who is trying to get membership of an exclusive club, but they're not letting him in because they suspect he is a homosexual, and he has to decide whether to be true to himself or not.

And then in the present, we have an academic who is looking at representations of queerness in this era, sort of arguing that queerness has been part of all culture.

Mm.

It's just been suppressed.

You know, there's, there's nothing new about some of these ideas.

So it's, it's quite a, it's a really good modern-

Mm

... contemporary idea, idea.

And it's a beautiful drama, and these stories all overlap and inter- interconnect in unexpected ways.

It's, it's not...

Y- you know, there's different time periods, so y- you sort of start to make some assumptions about how they intersect, but it's, um, surprising, some of the things that this film does.

I, I really dug it.

Mm.

I could see how people might dismiss it as being melodramatic, but it's sort of that more kind of grand tragedy sort of stuff comes in when the pieces fall into place.