14.11

A funeral car cruises the streets of Medellín, while a young director tells the story of his past in this violent and conservative city. He remembers the pre-production of his first film, a Class-B movie with ghosts. The young queer scene of Medellín is casted for the film, but the main protagonist dies of a heroin overdose at the age of 21. Reality and fiction mingle, giving us a cinematographic poem of mourning but also of hope, in particular to continue making films. Anhell69 explores the dreams, doubts and fears of an annihilated generation, and the struggle to carry on making cinema.

Dorothy Arzner was Hollywood’s most powerful director, though History has forgotten her. She began working in the film industry at 19 as a “cutter” before the advent of editors, and gradually worked her way up through the studio system. Determined and ambitious, Dorothy became interested in directing. She quickly abandoned editing and was accepted as a director at Paramount, as the first woman to direct a talking picture for the star Clara Bow.
A true pioneer of the cinema, she was the only woman director at a major Hollywood studio in the 1930s and 1940s, openly lesbian, dressed like a man, making movies “avant-gardiste” about women condition.