In 2017, documentary director Enric Ribes made a short film entitled “Singing on the roofs” with whom he briefly explored the story of the last drag queen in Barcelona’s Chinatown, Love Guild, who at 90 proved to be still active. Homage that the director paid to a figure who continues to be a living history of that most underground and rogue Barcelona, worthy of a work by Fassbinder, Now Ribes chooses to exploit that premise, from which a strong friendship was born, to tell a feature film that more deeply portrays the daily life of this quick-change artist who gives visibility to LGBT seniors.
Ribes highlights the current life of Gilda Love, who is currently 97, portrays her as an artist who, no doubt, looks like she was born to die on stage, as in Dalida’s song. In his present, the documentary maker remembers dealing with one of the most emblematic drag acts of the Barcelona underground scene of the 60s, 70s and 80s, which he came to work and live in Paris, performing in the iconic and historic Madame Arthur cabaret in the French capitalone of the most important venues for variety shows and disguises, as well as working as a servant in the house of Jean Cocteau.
Decidedly, A whole life dedicated to art and also to the visibility of the homosexual group, since Gilda Love arrived in Barcelona in 1967from his native San Fernando de Cádiz, where he was born in 1924, in the middle of the Third Republic, which means he is a direct witness to the Spanish Civil War, the subsequent postwar period, the economic boom of the 1960s, the defunct Francoist regime , the arrival of democracy, the attempted coup, the Movida de los 80 and, of course, how the movement for the rights of homosexuals and transsexuals was built in Spanish society.
Although a masterful documentary would also have come out, Ribes chooses to tell the present, of how yesterday’s legacy has become a shadow to remember the good times and, above all, to show how Gilda, whose name in her official documents is Eduardo, had to pay a high price to live in complete freedom, because devoting oneself professionally to cross-dressing does not guarantee (at least at the end of the 20th century) a decent retirement. However, Ribes, who wrote the screenplay with Xènia Puiggrós, shows the inner strength of a person who has always put the world on his head and who has always looked with his head held high.
Tribute to those elders who fought for LGBT rights when they didn’t exist
Ribes plays with documentary and fiction, introducing an element that changes his daily life, but it allows us to see the more human and tender side of Gilda, as she has to take care of a girl, Chloe, who she will take care of for a week until her mother, absent on work, picks her up. In addition to seeing the interaction between three generations, as the little girl could be Gilda’s great-granddaughter, the film allows us to see how Gilda, despite living day to day, has a neighborhood network similar to a familywhich reminds us that those who saw how their relatives put them aside because of their sexual orientation or identity, were able to start their own family, stronger if possible, because they chose it.
Gilda puts faces to the reality of the LGBT elderly, the one who is locked up in nursing homes and where they see how they must return to the closets they came out of decades ago (and for which they paid dearly for their freedom). The film questions the importance of looking at older homosexuals, bisexuals and transsexuals and the way their realities, their lives, cannot go back to the times of darkness. Although, above all, it is a tribute to Gilda, the last bastion of a Barcelona that no longer exists, devastated by gentrification and wild tourism, to her clothes, her couplets, her past, her present, her Hollywood idols, which surround her entire house, most notably Rita Hayworth, from whom she borrowed the stage name of her Guild, a powerful woman of the seventh art.
‘Singing on the roofs’, whose title is a tribute to the poet Federico García Lorca, borrowing the last stanzas of the poem ‘Canción del mariquita’, is a fascinating feature film, with a certain melancholy atmosphere due to the memories of yesterday, but bright, with an exceptional protagonist whose legacy has already been immortalized for posterity.
Note: 8
The best: To be able to meet Gina Love, an icon that is not lost in memory.
Worse: That in the middle of LGBT Pride week its prevalence is so discreet.
Source: E Cartelera
