The best goth is Latino goth. That much is clear throughout this documentary, which mourns the Colombian city of Medellin, for which director Teo Montoya narrates his elegy from inside a coffin. Fortunately, he is still alive—unlike eight of Doomy’s handsome LGBTQ+ Renegades, who talk about their lives on camera here, having killed themselves or died of drug overdoses since filming. They are thought to be victims, by proxy, of a kind of sociocultural violence in the surrounding society, a hangover from the cartel days.
Constructed in part from audition interviews with aspiring actors, Anhell69 is the remnants of Montoya’s unfinished film, of which we see excerpts: it takes place in a dystopian Medellín, where the preponderance of the dead and the lack of cemetery space have resulted in red-eyed phantoms walking the streets. These determined ones also enjoy horny liaisons with the living—a flare-up of “spectrophilia” that the authorities frown upon. It’s an amusing, campy metaphor for something that’s out in the open: the scorn and harassment that the city’s LGBTQ+ population endures every day. The first of this group, 21-year-old Montoya has chosen to play the lead role: doe-eyed Camilo, whose soft-smiling nihilism draws him in.
By breaking up his abandoned film, openly revealing insights from his queer comrades, rapturous goth-raving sequences, protest footage, and the galactic-looking cityscapes of Medellín, Montoya hopes it signifies “the cinema of the unbeliever who came here as a taxi driver (neorealist Víctor Gaviria, who came here as a taxi driver).” But his ambitions go even further: he aspires to make truly transgressive work, crossing boundaries as fluidly as his spectrophilic crew’s breaking gender lines.
Anhell69 effectively blurs the divide between reality and fiction – but it’s debatable how much of Montoya’s radicalism is in creating an alternative future. Many of the quixotic hopes expressed here are emphatically banal: “I want to be a Hollywood bitch!” proclaims one reveller. Traumatic past hems are as inconspicuous in these nighttime haunts as the surrounding mountains; it’s surprising how much talk, if not a viable future, of simply existing in the present moment. New horizons may be elusive, but Montoya strives hard in this imaginative and passionate piece of cinematic protest to create a breach for his tribe to see.
Anhell69 is true to the story from September 5th.
