SUN OCT 22, 2023 4:00 PM THE DEVIL QUEEN $8.00 (member) ; $13.00 (general admission) Los Feliz 3 | Introduction by filmmaker Chica Barbosa ‘Sunday ‘Rest’oration’ and ‘The Latin American Canon of Cruelty’ West Coast Premiere of New 4K Digitization! Co-presented by Cinelimite, Link Digital/Mapa Filmes, and Janela International de Cinema do Recife Tickets are no longer on sale for this event.
ABOUT THE FILM: In Portuguese with English subtitles. The Black gay “Devil’s Queen” (her real name is never mentioned) rules the underworld of Rio de Janeiro from the back room of a brothel. Her eyes thick with green eyeshadow, her gaze falls mercilessly upon the members of her drug cartel. The same jackknife can be used either to shave her legs or to slit open traitors. But her reign of terror is unstable; resistance is brewing. Soon, everyone is waging war against each other to replace the queen: the favela gangsters against the gays, the drag queens against the sex workers. People with few chances in bourgeois life. Fontoura’s garish pulp construction stands for popular Brazilian cinema during the military dictatorship, whereby power relations were exaggerated in nihilistic fashion. Much like in Karim Aïnouz’s Madame Satã (2002), legendary 1930s gangster figure João Francisco dos Santos serves here as an inspiration, who this time is transposed into the 1970s as an early representation of queerness. Milton Gonçalves plays her with various voices, and the dichotomous concept of masculinity – which allows no shades of grey between macho and queen – dissolves here into glitter and air. The 4K copy of THE DEVIL QUEEN was created at the initiative of Janela de Cinema do Recife in partnership with Cinelimite and the Link Digital/Mapa Filmes laboratory, in a process supervised by preservationist Débora Butruce using negative and positive copies from the National Archive of Rio de Janeiro and Centro Técnico Audiovisual. FORMAT: DCP COUNTRY: Brazil