Jeny303

“Passing by a bedroom, at the party, I saw people heating heroin. I wanted to try it out on my body…” Accompanied by the voice-over of Jeny – a young transsexual filmed during her rehab –, the camera wanders around building 303, Bogota’s architectural icon. A chance encounter: a few years back, when the filmmaker’s father asked her to film the architecture faculty where he had taught, an accident with her 16 mm film resulted in a superimposition of the portrait of Jeny. The film is a testimony where the discreet affirmation of revolt can be heard: “neither torturer, nor victim”. Jeny (who refers to himself in the masculine gender) recounts his delinquency as being the just return for the social violence committed against him. The building, disused at the time of the shooting, is not only interesting for its Bauhaus style copied by German architects in 1964, but also because it has been the centre of many student uprisings. During the generation of the filmmaker’s father, it was a hotspot of the activism repressed in bloodshed across all of South America. On one side a survivor (heroin used as an escape to elsewhere), who turned his tattooed body into a work of art, and on the other, the political slogans “tattooed” on the brick walls – open-air history books that were demolished in 2015. (Charlotte Garson)