Night Stage Directors Turn Cruising Into Queer Noir
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- Marcio Reolon and Filipe Matzembacher co-directed 'Night Stage,' their third feature set in a Porto Alegre cruising park, arriving the same year as the Oscar-nominated Brazilian cruising film 'The Secret Agent'
- The film follows theatre actor Matias (Gabriel Faryas) and closeted mayoral candidate Rafael (Cirillo Luna), who meet on a hook-up app and bond over an exhibitionism fetish involving curtains thrown wide open to the street
- The directors are developing a horror film and a western next, citing Italo Calvino's 'Six Memos for the Next Millennium' as inspiration for using genre as a 'mirror' to address heavy topics
- The Rio cinema in east London hosted a one-night naturist screening, advising patrons to bring a towel
- Reolon and Matzembacher, Porto Alegre natives who met at film school 17 years ago and now live in Berlin, called Berlinale jury president Wim Wenders' remark that filmmakers 'have to stay out of politics' 'embarrassing'
- Their second feature 'Hard Paint' (2018), about an online sex worker, won the Teddy prize at the Berlinale and portrayed Porto Alegre as 'purgatory' amid Brazil's 2016 coup and Bolsonaro's rise
Why it matters: The film crystallizes a wave of Brazilian queer cinema reclaiming genre traditions — noir, thriller, horror — long dominated by male heterosexual filmmakers, with Reolon and Matzembacher explicitly aiming to subvert the objectifying gaze by making characters 'aware they're being watched.' By rooting the story in Porto Alegre's actual cruising park while living in Berlin, the directors model how displaced queer artists stage the tension between shrinking public queer space and pressure to assimilate.
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