Re-ExistencesMovies like Re-Existences
- Key Features:
- LGBTQ+, Migration, Brazilian culture, Documentary, Personal stories, Social issues
- Tone:
- serious, earnest
- Target Audience:
- Documentary viewers, LGBTQ+ community, Social justice advocates
- Emotional Arc:
- Empathy → Reflection
Re-Existences

“Re-Existence” is a documentary about migration stories of individuals from the Brazilian queer community.
Re-Existences
A documentary film depicting five intimate portraits of migrants who fled their country of origin to seek refuge in France and find a space of freedom where they can fully experience their sexuality and their sexual identity: Giovanna, woman transgender of Colombian origin, Roman, Russian transgender man, Cate, Ugandan lesbian mother, Yi Chen, young Chinese gay man…

In vivid images, the documentary-like story of a drover and his family in the northern badlands of Brazil during the drought. A family in the search of new hope and destiny.

Recounted mostly through animation to protect his identity, Amin looks back over his past as a child refugee from Afghanistan as he grapples with a secret he’s kept hidden for 20 years.

A cruise ship and 3,000 men – it is a universe without heteros and women that usually remains a mystery to the outside world. Once a year the Dream Boat sets sail for a cruise exclusively for gay men where most passengers are united by the wish to live life authentically as themselves in a protected place.

Nina is an elderly woman who lives alone and feels distressed by the increasing violence in her neighborhood. Amidst conflicts with her neighbors, she decides to film the movement of drug traffickers from her window, hoping to assist the police. After months of recording suspicious activities, her initiative attracts the attention of a journalist, who approaches Nina and offers to support her in her mission.

Petra heads to New York in search of her older sister after a long time of being separated. They are both movie actresses and heirs of the wounds of the Brazilian dictatorship. But Petra has only a few clues: home movies, newspaper clippings, a diary...

A woman married to a former politician during the 1971 military dictatorship in Brazil is forced to reinvent herself and chart a new course for her family after a violent and arbitrary act.

Arata Kaizaki, a jobless adult, undergoes an experiment that makes him 10 years younger. He goes back to high school and falls in love with Chizuru Hishiro, who is more than she seems.

7-year-old Sasha has always known that she is a girl. Sasha’s family has recently accepted her gender identity, embracing their daughter for who she truly is while working to confront outdated norms and find affirmation in a small community of rural France.

Poignant stories of homelessness on the West Coast of the US frame this cinematic portrait of a surging humanitarian crisis.

Marina's life is thrown into turmoil following the death of her partner. Mourning the loss of the man she loved, she finds herself under intense scrutiny from those with no regard for her privacy.

From a repressive childhood to artistic revolution, Ney Matogrosso transforms Brazil's stages — and himself — through music, creativity and inner fire.

Just when Lola, 18 years old and transgender, learns that she can finally have surgery, her mother, who is her only financial support, passes away. Abiding by her mother’s last wishes, Lola and her father, who are permanently in conflict and have not seen each other for two years, undertake a journey all the way to the Belgian coast. They realize the outcome of the journey may not be the one they were both expecting...

A transgender woman takes an unexpected journey when she learns that she had a son, now a teenage runaway hustling on the streets of New York.

After leaving her daughter Jessica in a small town in Pernambuco to be raised by relatives, Val spends the next 13 years working as a nanny to Fabinho in São Paulo. She has financial stability but has to live with the guilt of having not raised Jessica herself. As Fabinho’s university entrance exams approach, Jessica reappears in her life and seems to want to give her mother a second chance. However, Jessica has not been raised to be a servant and her very existence will turn Val’s routine on its head. With precision and humour, the subtle and powerful forces that keep rigid class structures in place and how the youth may just be the ones to shake it all up.

Claudia and Flavio were once passionately in love, but all of that is over. Now, in their fifties, they must venture anew into the world of love and dating once more but for Claudia confronting the end and accepting a new beginning isn’t so easy. Claudia is unwilling to let go and forget the life she’s built with Flavio, while Flavio, eager to move on, soon finds himself in a relationship with a much younger woman. Claudia soon reconnects with Nina, a student from her days as a professor.

A collection of stories about and images of our world, offering an immersion to the core of what it means to be human. Through these stories full of love and happiness, as well as hatred and violence, it brings us face to face with the Other, making us reflect on our lives. From stories of everyday experiences to accounts of the most unbelievable lives, these poignant encounters share a rare sincerity and underline who we are – our darker side, but also what is most noble in us, and what is universal. Our Earth is shown at its most sublime through never-before-seen aerial images accompanied by soaring music, resulting in an ode to the beauty of the world, providing a moment to draw breath and for introspection. This film is a politically engaged work which allows us to embrace the human condition and to reflect on the meaning of our existence.

A lonely beach on the southernmost coast of Brazil is the scene for two friends, on the brink of adulthood, to explore their understanding of themselves and one another. Martin has been sent by his father to retrieve what appears to be an inheritance-related document from the family of his recently deceased and estranged grandfather. Tomaz accompanies him, seemingly hoping to regain some of their former closeness. The two boys shelter themselves in a glass house, in front of a cold and stormy sea.

In the favelas of Rio de Janeiro of the 1930s, João Francisco dos Santos is several things — son of slaves, ex-convict, thug, homosexual and adopted father for a number of pariahs. João expresses himself on the stage of a cabaret as Madame Satã.

A middle-class Black family in Brazil copes with the election of a far-right extremist president. The mother believes that she's cursed after an unexpected encounter, while her husband puts all of his hopes into their son's soccer career.

During the Carnival in the historical site of Pelourinho, Salvador da Bahia, we follow the lives of the tenants of a falling-to-pieces tenement house who try to get by using creativity, irony, humor, and music.

Eduardo Coutinho was filming a movie with the same name in the Northeast of Brazil, in 1964, when there came the military coup. He had to interrupt the project, and came back to it in 1981, looking for the same places and people, showing what had ocurred since then, and trying to gather a family whose patriarch, a political leader fighting for rights of country people, had been murdered.

A portrait of the myth of maternity around the story of Pepa and her daughter, who are evicted from their home and forced to wander for a place to live with no support network.

When João goes to Brazil in search of a better life, he meets punk music enthusiast Maria and falls in love with her. But his involvement in the local drug trade makes him the target of a vicious drug lord.

In 1941, the inhabitants of a small Jewish village in Central Europe organize a fake deportation train so that they can escape the Nazis and flee to Palestine.

In a dystopian future, the Brazilian government decrees a measure that forces black citizens to migrate to Africa in an attempt to return to their origins. Seeing themselves in the center of terror, two cousins take refuge in an apartment, where they debate social and racial issues, and share the same yearning for the change of country.

In Monterrey, Mexico, a young street gang spends their days dancing to slowed-down cumbia and attending parties. After a mix-up with a local cartel, their leader is forced to migrate to the U.S. but quickly longs to return home.

Babi discovers a betrayal by her long-term partner and decides to embark on a new adventure in life. On this journey, she meets judge Marco and they begin to live a story permeated by a lot of sexual tension.

Clara and Felice struggle to raise their three children in 1970s Rome. The eldest, Andrew, is transgender and yearns for another life where he gets to live as the boy he knows himself to be. Clara instinctively strives to protect her son by escaping into their imaginations to defuse family tensions.

Alex, an intersexed 15-year-old, is living as a girl, but she and her family begin to wonder whether she's emotionally a boy when another teenager's sexual advances bring the issue to a head. As Alex faces a final decision regarding her gender, she meets both hostility and compassion.

When Jaime, a gay teenager, is sent to live in a community of Jehovah's Witnesses in small-town Quebec, she falls madly in love with a devout Witness girl. The two embark on an intense affair with consequences that will reshape the rest of their lives.

The story of a loving couple who struggles to keep its relationship alive against the inescapable passing of time, told in a nonlinear way over the course of ten years in their lives.

Young Jin-hee is taken by her father to an orphanage near Seoul. He leaves her there never to return, and she struggles to come to grips with her fate. Jin-hee desperately believes her father will come back for her and take her on a trip.

A man's life is turned inside out after a visit from his college friend leads him into the unexpected.

While her mom is away, a teen sneaks out of the hippie commune where she lives and embarks on a life-changing adventure to discover who her father is.

Dona Hermínia will have to rediscover and reinvent herself because her children are forming new families. This supermom will have to deal with a new life scenario: Marcelina is pregnant and Juliano is getting married.

Donato fails in his attempt to save a drowning man, and meets one of the man's friends. He decides to start his life over, but pieces of his past keep coming after him.

Ana and Helen, two divorced women, were close friends as teenagers. Today, amidst the corona virus pandemic and in quarantine, they get in touch after 20 years via internet. Through video conference calls, memories, sensations and emotions reflourishes.

Bruno and Amanda have to face the difficulties of a long distance relationship after meeting in a flight forced into an emergency landing.

A mysterious woman on the run, and the resourceful fixer assigned to bring her in. Their two unique stories inextricably link, as the stakes of the pursuit rise to apocalyptic proportions.

Lucía is an eight-year-old girl, who sometimes struggles as the world tries to catch up with the fact that she is trans. As the summer holidays pass, she explores her femininity alongside the women of her family who at the same time reflect on their own femininity.

In 1980, the black Falashas in Ethiopia are recognised as genuine Jews and are secretly carried to Israel. The day before the transport the son of a Jewish mother dies. In his place and with his name (Schlomo) she takes a Christian 9-year-old boy.

Four sisters work together to raise rent money after learning they have to move to another neighborhood in this coming-of-age drama based on the series.

The story of an impossible love between a woman named Fred and a transgender woman named Laurence who reveals her inner desire to become her true self.

A teenager transitions from female to male, and his family must come to terms with that fact.

Outside, the first sun rays break the dawn. Sixteen years old Catarina can't fall asleep. Inconsequently, in the big city adults are moved by desire... Catarina found she is HIV positive. She wants to drag everyone else along.

Rubens is a carefree, charismatic swimming instructor who finds himself accused of displaying inappropriate affection toward one of his students by the boy's mother. Other parents and colleagues are only too eager to condemn him.

Bruno is a young film editor who has just broke up his marriage with Regina, and returned living in his mother's house. Drowned in deep sorrow, something very weird happens in his life: people around him are gradually disappearing. But only for him. Some kind of blindness.

Due to many reasons, ranging from insecurity to trauma, a group of people have gained a lot of weight in recent times.

The selfish Dr. André Luiz dies and awakes in the limbo called "Umbral". After a painful period in the gruesome swamp, he is rescued and brought in a white light to "Nosso Lar" (meaning "Our Home"). He finds a place of harmony, where people live in peace awaiting

On the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, Irene has only a few days to overcome her anxiety and renew her strength before sending her eldest son out into the world.

Rosa's life, a highly valued professional, is turned upside down when her grandfather Marcelino dies.

And suddenly, overnight, the world came to a halt. Two men, two survivors, one kid, and hatred that separates them. A place forgotten by everyone, including the creatures that inhabit the Earth... until now.

On a random night, Marco and Laura meet at a karaoke bar and sing the song "Evidências" together. Since then, they fell in love and formed a couple that seemed perfect, until the moment they said “yes”. Without understanding what happened, now, every time this song plays, Marco will travel through his memories with Laura.

A day in the life of Azucena, who is running out of time to keep herself and her family from being evicted; Rafael, a lawyer who sets out to reunite a mother with her daughter; and Teodora, a sick old woman who searches for her long-lost son before it is too late.

Ludovic is waiting for a miracle. With six-year-old certainty, she believes she was meant to be a little girl -- and that the mistake will soon be corrected. But where she expects the miraculous, Ludo finds only rejection, isolation and guilt -- as the intense reactions of family, friends, and neighbors strip away every innocent lace and bauble. As suburban prejudices close around them, family loves and loyalties are tested in the ever-escalating dramatic turns of Alain Berliner's critically acclaimed first feature. Winner of the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and a favorite at festivals around the world, this unique film experience delivers magic of the rarest sort through a story of difference, rejection, and childlike faith in miracles.

A fatally ill mother with only two months to live creates a list of things she wants to do before she dies without telling her family of her illness.

"Behind every strong man is a strong woman!", Mumine shouts as her husband is arrested. She has 4 children, she's in her mid-30s, and she's the wife of a Crimean Tatar political prisoner. Muslim Crimean Tatars have been oppressed for a long time. They were deported under Stalin, allowed to return under Gorbachev, and since the occupation of Crimea in 2014 under Putin, they are being persecuted again. "Return" is a portrait of Mumine and Maye, two strong women struggling with the consequences of oppression. Their traditional understanding of their role as women does not stand in the way of their dedication. They possess strength, beauty and dignity. Only in their most intimate moments, they are overwhelmed by desperate helplessness.

Brother and sister Enrique and Rosa flee persecution at home in Guatemala and journey north, through Mexico and on to the United States, with the dream of starting a new life.

Simón, a Venezuelan freedom fighter exiled in Miami, copes not only with trauma, but also deep guilt over a choice he must make: stay in Miami and start a new life, or return home to the losing fight against a tyrannical regime.

Magdalena makes a journey to find her son, who has disappeared on his way to the Mexican border with the United States. Her odyssey takes her to meet Miguel, a man recently deported from the US. They start to travel together, Magdalena looking for her son, and Miguel hoping to see his mother again.

A single mother and a childless morgue technician are bound together by their relationship to a little girl they have reanimated from the dead.

Ayiva recently left his home in Burkina Faso in search of a way to provide for his sister and his daughter. He takes advantage of his position in an illegal smuggling operation to get himself and his best friend Abas off of the continent. Ayiva adapts to life in Italy, but when tensions with the local community rise, things become increasingly dangerous. Determined to make his new situation work he attempts to weather the storm, but it has its costs.

Theo is living the good life in an upscale Brazilian neighborhood. He’s a hardworking doctor, husband, and father. However, Theo has chosen his career over his family, and little by little he discovers that his world is crumbling around him. His beloved mentor and surrogate father is dying, and his wife announces that she wants a divorce. Yet nothing prepares him for the day when he comes home to discover that his 15-year-old son, Pedro, has disappeared. Theo takes to the road in search of his son. In a journey that leads him throughout Brazil, Theo discovers what really matters to him. Searching for his missing son, Theo finds himself.

Adopted from South Korea, raised on different continents & connected through social media, Samantha & Anaïs believe that they are twin sisters separated at birth.

Remmy and her parents, refugees from Earth, have found peace on the Martian outskirts until strangers appear in the hills beyond their farm. Told as a triptych, the film follows Remmy as she struggles to survive in an uneasy landscape.

Fernanda is married to Tom, with whom she has a five-year-old daughter, Joana. The couple is in the midst of wear and tear caused by living together for many years, which generates constant friction. Who helps Fernanda to overcome the crisis is her partner Aníbal, inseparable partner during the arduous journey between saving the marriage or putting an end to it.

About existence from the perspective of 20 nameless black females. Each of the women portray one of the characters represented in the collection of twenty poems, revealing different issues that impact women in general and women of color in particular.

A documentary shot by filmmakers all over the world that serves as a time capsule to show future generations what it was like to be alive on the 24th of July, 2010.

Jesús, a young hairdresser, works at a Havana nightclub for drag performers and dreams of being a performer himself. Encouraged by his mentor, Mama, Jesús finally gets his chance to take the stage. But when Angel, his estranged father recently released from a 15-year stint in prison, abruptly reenters his life, his world is quickly turned upside down. The macho Angel tries to squash his son’s ambition to perform in drag. Father and son clash over their opposing expectations of each other, struggling to understand one another and reconcile as a family. Shot in a gritty neighborhood far from the Havana most tourists know, Viva is a heartrending story of music, performance, and survival.

A young man seeking his sexual identity decides to take part in the Miss France beauty pageant.

In 1950s Mexico City, William Lee, an American ex-pat in his late forties, leads a solitary life amidst a small American community. However, the arrival in town of Eugene Allerton, a young student, stirs William into finally establishing a meaningful connection with someone.

In 1975, Ryszard Kapuściński, a veteran Polish journalist, embarked on a seemingly suicidal road trip into the heart of the Angola's civil war. There, he witnessed once again the dirty reality of war and discovered a sense of helplessness previously unknown to him. Angola changed him forever: it was a reporter who left Poland, but it was a writer who returned…

A Cape Verdean woman navigates her way through Lisbon, following the scanty physical traces her deceased husband left behind and discovering his secret, illicit life.

40-year-old Daniel has been suspended from active police work and is under internal investigation for violence. When Sara, his internet love affair, stops answering his texts he decides to drive north in search of her, starting on what is apparently a fool's errand. He shows Sara's picture around, but nobody seems to recognize the woman. Until eventually one guy pops up, saying he can put the two in touch under very specific conditions.

A group of literature-loving friends bury letters to be opened 10 years later when they will confront the dreams of their youth with what the future has held in store for them.

Campers at an LGBTQ+ conversion camp endure unsettling psychological techniques while the campsite is stalked by a mysterious killer.

Middle-aged family man Arnaldo is kicked out by his wife because of a misunderstanding. Instead of despairing, Arnaldo takes advantage of the situation to turn around his unsatisfying adult life by going to live in a flat shared with four university students.

Arranged to marry a rich man, young Ada is crushed when her true love goes missing at sea during a migration attempt — until a miracle reunites them.

After World War II, Anita, a young survivor of Auschwitz, becomes involved in an intense and passionate affair that almost shatters her until she gains the strength to start a new life.

Describing herself as a 'street queen,' Johnson was a legendary fixture in New York City’s gay ghetto and a tireless voice for LGBT pride since the days of Stonewall, who along with fellow trans icon Sylvia Rivera, founded Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.), a trans activist group based in the heart of NYC’s Greenwich Village. Her death in 1992 was declared a suicide by the NYPD, but friends never accepted that version of events. Structured as a whodunit, with activist Victoria Cruz cast as detective and audience surrogate, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson celebrates the lasting political legacy of Johnson, while seeking to finally solve the mystery of her unexplained death.

Memo lives on a remote Chilean sheep farm, hiding a beautiful singing voice from the outside world. A recluse with a glittery flair, he can't stop dwelling on the past, but what will happen once someone finally listens?

Marked by losses and mismatches, José's eccentric family seek to be happy while locked in Paraíso Perdido, a nightclub that has stopped in time, where they sing popular romantic music.

As he pedals through the streets of Paris to deliver meals, Souleymane recounts his story. In two days, he has to go through his asylum application interview, the key to obtaining papers, but Souleymane is not ready.

An extremely wealthy elderly man dying from cancer undergoes a radical medical procedure that transfers his consciousness to the body of a healthy young man but everything may not be as good as it seems when he starts to uncover the mystery of the body's origins and the secret organization that will kill to keep its secrets.

"Master" is the name of a 12-story apartment building in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro's neighborhood for nightlife. Over the course of four weeks in 2001, Eduardo Coutinho's film crew rented one of the 276 apartments and used it as home base to make a film about the building's residents. We get to know the building manager, who succeeded in turning the troubled residence into a family complex within just a few years. Using interviews and a few stolen moments in the corridors of the building, Coutinho explores this world. Most of the building's residents come from the lower middle class and are just getting by, but that's just about the only thing they have in common - so many people, so many stories, sometimes told in a self-confident tone, sometimes with averted eyes. The fact that a film crew is interested in their stories puzzles some of them. Hope, fear, dreams, memories, love and loneliness all appear from behind the doors of this average apartment building.

A filmmaker talks about his work and love life with an unseen friend behind the camera. We also watch four of his short films.

The lives of a macho butcher, his wife, a lonely waitress, a sadist and a flophouse manager intersect in Recife, Brazil.

When they discover their town lacks funding for a sewage system, but does have a federal grant to make a movie, a group of villagers decide to make a sci-fi joint about a monster who lives in the building site of a septic tank.

Two girls have a chance encounter and instantly befriend. While trying to find themselves, they decide to pursue music together.

Documentary filmmaker Erik and closeted lawyer Paul meet through a casual encounter, but they find a deeper connection and become a couple. Individually and together, they are risk takers — compulsive, and fueled by drugs and sex. In an almost decade-long relationship defined by highs, lows, and dysfunctional patterns, Erik struggles to negotiate his own boundaries and dignity and to be true to himself.

An emotional journey of a former school teacher, who writes letters for illiterate people, and a young boy, whose mother has just died, as they search for the father he never knew.

Mattia is about to move to Madrid by his boyfriend Eduard. When the day before leaving for Spain, Eduard announces his arrival in Rome to know the "laws", Mattia must choose whether to finally come clean with his companion, or confess to being a formidable liar.

Pierre is seventeen and in the middle of puberty. He plays in a band, has sex at parties and secretly tries on women’s clothing and lipstick in front of a mirror. Ever since his father’s death, his mother Aracy has looked after him and his younger sister Jacqueline, spoiling them both. But when he discovers that she stole him from a hospital when he was a new born baby, Pierre’s life changes dramatically. In her new film, director Anna Muylaert explores the mother-child relationship through the eyes of a rebellious son whose whole world unravels overnight.

An investigation of how Hollywood's fabled stories have deeply influenced how Americans feel about transgender people, and how transgender people have been taught to feel about themselves.

After being neglected by her mother, a little girl is taken in by her uncle and his transgender girlfriend, who create a loving home for her.

Born a fully grown black man in a village in the Brazilian jungle, Macunaíma later magically transforms into a white man before making an adventure-filled trip to the city of São Paulo. Once there, he becomes something of a dandy, falling in love with Ci, a revolutionary who dies in an accidental bombing. After robbing a ruthless industrialist, Macunaima returns to his village where he finds his newly acquired knowledge and possessions of little use.

Kira's skin starts to age rapidly, dry out and crumble away. But then she discovers that she can replace her own skin with somebody else's.

After author Mia finds love with single father Emil, their happiness is put to the test as they undergo fertility treatments to have kids of their own.
