Luiz Roque: HEAVEN

Tramway presents the European premier of HEAVEN, a film work by Brazilian artist Luiz Roque.

Luiz Roque’s HEAVEN follows an intense love story surviving under pressure. In the year 2080, a time when the Epstein-Barr virus (mononucleosis) mutates into a much more aggressive version – connected to immunodeficiency diseases – a complex sociopolitical tangle comes to surface. Not by chance, the narrative takes place a hundred years after the beginning of the 1980, a decade marked by the discovery of AIDS – a process that took over the news and absorbed the global imagination, and was deliberately used to create social stigmas. In the movie, the new potential epidemic hits mainly the transsexual community which struggles in a resistance against both the deep health problem and the public oppression.

With a cast comprised of transsexual actresses, HEAVEN comments on the control of bodies by the state, in a condition wherein bureaucratic borders lead to the violent dissociation between biological life and political existence.

Edited from original text by Germano Dushá