Partying, Fighting and Loving: A Review of Agustina Comedi’s Playback
/“Night after night, after every playback, we robbed the divas of a bit of the eternity the world denied us.”
These are the words of La Delpi, a drag queen who performs with the Kalas Group. Narrating over a montage of glittered choreography and fiery performances play on screen, La Delpi speaks to a crowd of excited queens:
‘We crossed the door to La Piaff, and the fantasy halted what was wrong outside.”
Instagram / @playback_shortfilm
From filmmaker Agustina Comedi’s short Playback, this scene is a 14-minute memory landscape comprised of performance playback footage of the Kalas Group, an Argentian collective of drag queens and transgender women formed in Córboda, Spain. Amid a military regime in Argentina and the AIDs epidemic— a moment of trans genocide and illness, the group formed. La Delpi, who narrates the entire film, is the only survivor of the Kalas Group, many of whom succumbed to AIDs in the late ‘80s.
Despite what was happening on the outside, the group created a collective fantasy that provided temporary relief to the horrors of the world. Not only is this an intimate, nostalgic film, but it also documents the rebellion of the era. As Comedi puts it, “in a catholic conservative city, the Kalas Group created their weapons out of improvised dresses and playbacks.”
The film is a display of friendship and tragedy through the opulence and beauty of drag. Audiences witness precious memories through the group’s strength and glamour. Here, drag and performance is a revolutionary reprieve from oppressors, an imagined world where these queens can momentarily conquer disease and disaster.
“This world that becomes grayer each day needs to look through the spells,” says Comedi.—“The dreams and the revolutions of these persecuted ‘aunts,’ such as La Delpi, because they were good at partying, fighting and loving— three things that this agonizing history requires urgently.”
Winner of the Berlin Teddy Award and presented at Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) 2020, this film shows us how some realities are just too cruel and inhabitable to get stuck in. Beautiful worlds and fantasies serve a purpose if only to allow people to feel invincible and untouchable for one night.
