Esprit de Corps

Esprit de Corps

Meet the film’s director Kanakan Balintagos, in partnership with MIX Copenhagen.
Screening will be followed by an after-party with drinks, DJ, and performances.
NB: Get a reduction for the screening of the second Queer Night film, Quick Change, by showing your ticket to Esprit de Corps.

There’s a fascination, in the latest Kanakan Balintagos (aka Auraeus Solito), for the exacerbated virility of a soldier’s body, for the sheer force it exudes as well as its inherent sensuality, a take that is reminiscent of Claire Denis’ 1999 Beau Travail. But whereas the French filmmaker used military flesh as abstract figures, Esprit de Corps goes for another direction, more visceral, more tangible, questioning instead the psychological and emotional mechanisms at work that lead two paragons of physical male heterosexuality to mutual attraction.

Favoring sequence-shots in which exhaustion plays a great part in stripping down the characters out of their social personas and revealing, as much to the viewers as to themselves, the true nature of their identities and buried desires, Kanakan Balintagos manages to capture on screen a truth anybody can easily rely to: how difficult it is to encounter someone who can accept you for who you truly are.

Event: The film will be followed by a Q&A with the director Kanakan Balintagos, and an after-party in Asta Bar.

Director: Kanakan Balintagos (Philippines, 2014)
With: Sandino Martin, JC Santos, Lharby Policarpio
75 min. English subtitles.

Artists