Finlandia (Spanish)

Muxes are recognized as a third gender among the Zapotec people down in Oaxaca, southern Mexico, and they're non-binary in how they live their identity. Mexican culture leans pretty machista overall, so muxes end up filling caregiver roles a lot, and they earn real respect both for that work and for who they are. This film feels less like a movie and more like a piece of visual art that pulls you straight into what it actually feels like to live as a muxe. I honestly can't think of another film that functions this much like a painting come to life. It's packed with life, with love, with real heartbreak too, and the whole thing comes across as this incredible burst of culture and creativity. You might not walk away loving it purely as a story, but there's no arguing with how gorgeous and vivid it looks.

The film follows a community of muxes pushing back against the idea that gender only exists in two boxes, and we spend time with three of them, Delirio, Amaranta, and Mariano, moving through their past, their present, and where they're headed. Each one is chasing something they feel is missing. Delirio's got a lover over in Finland who keeps writing to her but never actually commits to anything real, and she's the older figure in the group, mentoring the younger muxes while also stuck caring for her aging mother alone, and she never backs down from the sexist, heteropatriarchal harassment the men around her throw at her. Amaranta carries the weight of her father rejecting her, a man who's violent, angry, and still can't accept that his son identifies as a third gender. She's got a straight guy in her life too, someone who only shows up when it suits him, which just highlights how much love is missing from her world. Then there's Mariano, a teenage boy still figuring out who he is, happiest hanging out with Delirio making clothes, even though his mom's got her heart set on him becoming a priest. Marta enters the picture as a fashion designer from Spain, sent to Oaxaca on a corporate mission to essentially steal the region's traditional designs, taking photos and samples so her company can knock them off and sell them for profit without paying the community a cent. But Amaranta welcomes her in with real warmth, folding her into their community completely. The longer Marta lives among the muxes, the more she gets pulled into their struggles, their passions, the pain none of them talk about out loud, and she's forced to question everything she assumed she wanted and what belonging even means to her. In the end she can't bring herself to betray the people who took her in, and the film closes on this poetic note where an earthquake hits and several characters, Marta included, treat it as their chance to rewrite their own paths.

This isn't a gay film exactly, but it's about gender and identity in a way that absolutely belongs to our community. Oaxacan culture bleeds through every frame, colors, music, food, drink, all of it. I can't really speak to how accurate the cultural details are compared to real life, since I don't have that context myself. There's a scene where Amaranta brings Marta to this spot she calls a wall of lamentations, where muxes go to cry out their pain in front of a massive white stone they call the rock of the soul, and visually it's stunning. The cinematography shows real command of space, with these almost precious, color-saturated frames that mirror what's happening inside each character. It makes the landscapes and the traditional muxe clothing hit even harder. There's also a segment about Finlandia that gets up close with how these designs actually get made, mostly by the muxes themselves. What makes this film stand out isn't just that it shows a queer cultural identity we almost never see on screen, it's how it layers in the exploitation that happens when capitalism swoops in to profit off that same representation. It manages to juggle cultural appropriation, transphobia, aging, and corporate greed all at once, and somehow makes it work. Every performance in this is genuinely great. I've got some notes on the storytelling side, places where it could've been tighter, but the imagery, the poetry of it, the colors, all of that is going to stick with me for a long time. (6.5/10)