© CREAS FILMS
TAN INMUNDA Y TAN FELIZ
SO FILTHY AND SO HAPPY
Director—Edwin Oyarce
Documentary, CHL 2022—87min—18+
Spanisch original version with English subtitles
Fast-paced biopic about Hija de Perra, the queer Chilean drag icon.
The life and work of Hija de Perra, the queer Chilean drag icon who repeatedly portrayed herself as an unsettling cross between Divine and Nina Hagen. So Filthy and So Happy brings together a veritable treasure trove of archive footage of the artist, who died in 2014 – and the title says it all. Hija de Perra laughs in the face of the repressive order with her Mephistophelean, overdrawn features and lustfully hysterical gestures. Her Medusalike performances feast on all the attributes with which society brands those who evade its access – they feast on the dirty, the obscene and the grotesque – and stage a veritable dissidence of the ‚scum‘. “My intention,” Hija de Perra confesses with playful sadism right at the beginning of the film, ‘is trauma.
Edwin Oyarce‘s film, which is not only a farewell letter and a ritual invocation of demons, but also a film about queer filmmaking itself, is a tender and anarchic monument to Hija de Perra, bursting with queer explosive force and joie de vivre.
© CREAS FILMS