Directed by a trans woman who takes a 20th century novel and adapts it to the emotional issues of the 21st century, So Pretty is an intimate portrait of a group of trans people living together in a relationship of friendship and non-monogamous love.

There is nothing new in what modernity has to say regarding different possible ways of living and loving. Rather, it is merely recovering the multiple forms of being and living that colonial shame has repressed and manipulated throughout history.

Jessica Dunn Rovinelli holds in her gaze her proximity to this theme and her own life as a queer person. In my view, by placing herself in front of the camera, the director makes this story a far more intimate and genuine one. Here we do not have someone external to this reality, conducting a study about a community with a pre-formed or pre-idealised perspective on its bodies. On the contrary, we have a person who is part of that community, telling us what it is like to live in those bodies.

What I find really interesting and, without doubt, the film’s high point, is that at the same time as Rovinelli puts herself into the story by inhabiting the skin of the character Tonia — telling us of the challenges her body bears as a trans woman openly searching for love and experiencing conflicts of identity — she also steps away from the story in order to make room for other marginalised bodies (as is the case of the dark and brown skinned characters, who, in addition to questions relating to gender identity, also experience racial struggles).

The character Erika, who for me is one of the most successful in terms of her development, points out a few issues that are very close to me as a Black, trans person who has been socialised as a brown skinned woman. My experience of intimacy is the same as Erika’s, where emotional relationships must be considered with greater care since we are rarely seen as worthy of love, and where loneliness is very present in our bodies. The loneliness of the brown or dark skinned woman is portrayed very clearly in this film, be it in the silence and speech of this character, or in the way she is framed until the final scenes of the film.

Another aspect of the film to note is the issue of sexuality, and the way in which it is shown. Unfortunately, cinema usually falls short in its representation of the queer community and the Black community. These bodies have often been the victim of stereotypes and filmed in dehumanising ways as if they were entertainment at a circus or a zoo. When we hear about ‘places of speech’ it is precisely because Black people and queer people today demand to see themselves represented in a dignified fashion. But who should film those bodies? Who has the necessary sensitivity to film those bodies? How can we film, for example, a non-monogamous love relationship between bodies that have always been hypersexualised and fetishised? Jessica’s gaze as a director, which is also very present in the editing of the film (indeed, she was the film’s editor), allows her to humanise these bodies in scenes that in other films are generally made into a spectacle. Personally, I do not feel in this an exploitation of sex, which is clearly due to the fact that, for these bodies, sexuality goes beyond the definition of sex having to involve the use of one’s genitals, or pleasure as defined by the patriarchy. Between them, these characters determine what pleasure is, what love is, when and how to be present, and when not to be. But when we talk about social and political relationships the idea of absence is not always understood, and this is also questioned by the film: What does being present mean to certain bodies? What does struggle mean for certain bodies? Struggles of the left often make demands for collective presence, without reflecting on the fact that the collective is made up of individuals, and each individual has their own body, and each body has its own history and traumas. In this way, the film also questions the policing and practicing of violence against Black, indigenous, brown and dark bodies in the context of racism in the USA.

So Pretty is therefore as personal as it is political, since the intimacy of marginalised bodies is traversed daily by socio-political struggles. Even though the wish of these people is to simply exist, their right to existence has been disregarded, and all that is left for them is to create strategies for survival through which, at least, they can feel that they belong.