Castanha

The portrait of an endearing 52-year-old cross-dresser who performs in underground gay clubs.

The hero of this dark documentary is João Castanha, a cross-dresser who lives with his mother and spends his nights singing in the underground gay clubs of Porto Alegre, Brazil. Haunted by ghosts from the past, João moves between the harsh reality of daily life and his moments of glamour on stage. Set against a backdrop of shifting realities, director Davi Pretto captures his protagonist's rapidly swirling emotions and merges them into a new fiction, defying the rules of documentary filmmaking.