Desire lines

by Jules Rosskam
Singapore • 2025 • 1h49
with USA • 2024 • 1h21 • Vostfr

Ahmad is Iranian and trans, emigrated to the United States in the past. Today, aged 60 years old, he goes to the lgbtqia+ archives in Chicago in search of his identity. He met Kieran, a young non-binary activist. Together, iels embark on a journey, psychic and emotional, through the homosexual culture of the gay saunas of the 1980s and pornographic cinemas.
"Fullly fide the binarity of things, Desire Lines is a hybrid feature film mixing fiction and documentary. It is first of all a collage of interviews giving the floor to those who are rarely heard. [...] This free speech is enough to bring to this mosaic of trans fraternity a great dynamism and an air of never-view. But this documentary work is regularly interspersed by a series of fictitious episodes taking place in a documentation centre dedicated to the trans question. Through the freedom of its narrative and aesthetic form, the result is to be recorded among other successes of trans documentary cinema such as Orlando, my political biography of Paul B. Preciado. » The Polyester