"If we don't feel that our bodies can desire and be desired, we won't have fulfilling lives."

Special correspondent to the Berlin Film FestivalIvan runs into a former schoolmate at the Almería greenhouse where they both work, and their mutual attraction leads to a night of confidences and sex on the beach. It is, as the director says ofIvan & HadoumIan de la Rosa (Granada, 1988) describes it as "a classic love story with characters that aren't," because Ivan is a trans man and Hadoum is the rebellious daughter of North African migrants. This is perhaps what allows them to accept each other naturally and without prejudice. But the film, a Catalan co-production premiering this Friday at the Berlinale in the Panorama section, stems from overcoming the conflict with trans identity, a theme the director, who trained as a chess player, already explored eleven years ago in his short film. Victor XX"Now the conflict has to do with other things, with choosing what kind of person you want to be and empowering yourself through love and desire," explains De la Rosa, who in 2022 was, with the short film Farrucas, the first trans filmmaker to win a Gaudí award

The reason for "decentralizing the trans experience" was to be able to see the kinds of stories she missed in film. "I have few opportunities, or none at all, to see my experience represented in film," she says. "I've transitioned, okay, and for me it's wonderful to be trans. But I wanted to be able to show trans characters without focusing on the difficulties related to being who they are. And I'm not saying those difficulties don't exist, but what unites us with everyone else is that we are people, just like everyone else." For De la Rosa, normalizing the relationship was almost a necessity. "If we don't feel that our bodies can desire and be desired, we won't have full lives," she points out. "Cinema owes a debt to the trans experience, and it had to be renaturalized through love and desire to heal the wound. In the end, people accept who you are, and if they don't like it, they leave your circle. I love myself, and I want to leave your circle. I'm very lucky to have the family I have. We need to relax a little."

The film's main conflict revolves around Iván's family's ambition to move to a larger apartment. To achieve this, Iván needs the greenhouse owner, a family friend, to give him a raise and make him head of the warehouse. However, a demand for better working conditions, spearheaded by Hadoum among the female employees just days before a visit from investors, puts Iván, who has become the man of the house and the main provider since his father's death, in a difficult position. "Everything is tied to capitalism," De la Rosa points out. "His family's problem isn't that he's trans, but rather a social aspiration—something as simple and yet as complicated these days as every member having their own room. Iván will have to see how far he'll go to climb that small rung on the social ladder."

The film's casting mixes trained and non-professional actors, but the two leads, multidisciplinary artist Silver Chicón and singer Herminia Loh, came to the roles "through friends of friends." Meanwhile, in Victor XX De la Rosa had worked with a cis actress to play a trans character, and now she was clear that, at all costs, she wanted a trans actor. "I filmed Victor XX "It was the summer of 2014, and the landscape was very different from what it is now. I was just starting my transition, and it was a desert; there were no trans role models. The change in a decade has been incredible," says De la Rosa. "Right now, it's important that trans bodies are represented by trans bodies, and going back would be almost like one black face"Actually, the most important thing about a story is the bodies that tell you this story," he says.