Theo Montoya's ANHELL69 (2023)+ a conversation with the director

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Anhell69

directed by Theo Montoya

2023, Colombia/Romania/France/Germany, 75m, DCP

Thursday, June 20

2220 Arts + Archives

2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, 90057

doors: 7:30pm

film : 8:00pm

Followed by a pre-recorded conversation with director Theo Montoya

This arresting, supremely confident debut feature from Colombian filmmaker Theo Montoya is a vividly conceived and dreamlike docufiction – at once a blissful evocation of queer nightlife in Medellín, and a deeply felt elegy for queer lives lost in an era of austerity and violence. A young filmmaker (Montoya) tells the story of his past while recalling the pre-production of his first film, a B-movie wherein Colombia’s ghosts, (whose presence recalls the spectral figures in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) walk among the living. Yet amid real-life interviews with teenagers and twentysomethings, the filmmaker must reckon with ghosts both real and imagined, as Colombia’s new lost generation finds community and transcendence in the club. A self-described “trans film” and a triumph of personal filmmaking, Anhell69 is an act of documentary as pure cinema.

In Spanish with English subtitles. A Sentient.Art.Film release.

Winner: Venice Film Festival (Critic’s Week), Jury Special Mention

Official Selection: True/False, SXSW 2023

Special thanks to Keisha Knight and Tony Nguyen (Sentient.Art.Film).

“With Anhell69, Montoya has constructed an indelible, at times shattering portrait of a collection of lovers and fighters who have embraced hedonistic nihilism, just in order to find a place to exist.” -Michael Sicinski, In Review Online

“Part documentary, part celebration of outsider lives, and part remembrance, it’s a defiantly hybrid piece that’s cunning, challenging…[and] seemingly conceived to play out on the border between life and death itself.” -Jonathan Holland, Screen International

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