Sin tetas artificiales no hay paraiso

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Note of intent

My own experiences in Bogotá, Berlin and Havana encouraged me to write this treatment for “Without Artificial Tits There Is No Paradise,” a highly personal film addressing several gender-related issues. Endry is a transgender character who is confronted with being the first visible transgender in Colombian public and mainstream media. While in my short film “Mila Caos,” my protagonist Sébastian fights for visibility, in “Without Artificial…” my Protagonist Endry has to maintain boundaries between her own understanding of her persona and the image created by the projection of others upon herself. She fears losing herself in the image created by “others” as the characters she plays are manipulated by an over stereotyped idea of a trans person. Endry knows that she is being used for a commercialized progressive and innovative “look” of a cheap TV series, and finds herself caught in between fighting for visibility in the media and realizing how this same visibility stigmatizes herself and other trans.
The narration plays with drama but is not a Tragedy. Endry doesn’t break down with her ideals, because she has no fixed ones. In the process of having to deal with being the first transgender in mass media, she starts to rethink her own identity. The narrative does not focus on dramatic events, but in creating an atmosphere in which the protagonist can defend herself. I want to work with actors as well as “non-actors.” I am interested in the artificial recreation of reality and the tension it produces, always focusing on the body and its connection to its environment. Endry is not outsourced by society, she is “integrated” at the price of losing the ownership over her own image. Can Endry undermine the expectation of others? Is Endry subversive in breaking viewing habits in mass media? Or is Endry just an individual grieving for personal satisfaction?
 

Synopsis

Armed with five mobiles, ENDRY CARDOÑA, sells phone calls in the city centre of Bogotá. In fact she is a living phone booth for the conversations of the city, from the local dealers to businessmen at lunch. ENDRY’s course of life changes when a drunken director invites her to a casting. At the audition ENDRY gets furious at the director, which ultimately lands her the role of USNAVY, the protagonist of the latest telenovela: “Without Artificial Tits there is no Paradise”. From one day to the next, ENDRY becomes a star. The whole nation watches USNAVY’s story of rape and violence in the life of a transsexual prostitute from the slums of the Caribbean coast. She appears in every magazine, even the Colombian Playboy, moves into a Feng Shui chic apartment and attends parties for the social elite. One day in a first class gym, another customer complains to ENDRY for using the female dressing room. ENDRY is enraged with the customer and the owner of the gym, who in the end kicks her out. The telenovela becomes more and more sexually explicit and violent. ENDRY shows an extraordinary performance when they shoot the key scene of USNAVY’s father raping her. The next day ENDRY invites her best friends LAURITA and CLARA to a luxurious restaurant. When Music starts playing ENDRY climbs on top of the bar and starts ripping the cloths off her body in front of the conservative diners. LAURITA and CLARA manage to get her down and carry her outside. The final scene of the telenovela finds USAVY in the midst of a gunfight with the police, trying to protect her boyfriend, the local gangster, and both get shot dead in the street. At the wrap party the director offers ENDRY the lead role in the next telenovela: “Cocaine Wives”, but a transexual prostitute interrupts them begging for money. When ENDRY refuses, the transexual shouts out at her “You are one of us, bitch!”  As the guards kick her out violently. After the party, affected by the event, ENDRY walks down to the city centre of Bogotá… 

Visual concept

„Without Artificial tits there is no paradise“ wants to explore a cinematic language that borrows from and plays with
popular forms of TV melodrama, whilst subverting them in order to expose issues of representation and identity. Playing with these conventions I also hope to challenge the expectations of the audience, providing something funny, fresh and entertaining but at the same time contemplative and dramatic.

“Without Artificial Tits there is no paradise” will be shot in a way that plays with the visual style of the telenovela whilst maintaining a cinematic approach. I want to denaturalize the world of the upper classes, to make it uncomfortable and stifling. I want the grass to be too green, the sky too blue, the roses too red. I envisage much use of tense static and slow-moving tracking shots; of wide angles and deep focus, geometrical compositions and hyperreal, saturated colours- all shot with enough HD resolution to make your eyes bleed.