Coinciding with this month’s Movie Club screening of Analú Laferal and Tiagx Vélez’s The Third World After the Sun, which is available to stream via our Patreon until September 27, we present an essay on the film.
by Esmé Holden
There are a few different ways we talk about the origins of queerness. For a while, the most popular was that we were “born this way”, that we are set on the right track (baby), predetermined by some yet undiscovered but inevitable and material genetic difference. These days, the queer community seems much more comfortable allowing a congregation of factors: genetic, social and even spiritual to co-exist. As a trans woman, a looser definition sits more comfortably with the history of an identity that has been in constant flux, both in how it is described (the term “transexual” only came into use in the 1920s, and transgender followed fifty years later) and in its expression, since it is to a certain extent tied to the language of societal gender norms, they are at least in conversation.
Both of these ideas rest on the same fundamental mystery, as we simply do not yet know exactly what makes someone queer—and maybe it’s better we keep it that way. Often those most eager to categorise us, to reduce us to some biological formula, do not have our best interests at heart. How do we really think detectable gay or trans or BDSM or asexual genetics would be used? At best, it would be utilized to invalidate whoever deviates from these newly aligned norms, but realistically for something far more sinister. Even those who look for answers in earnest are at risk of locking us away into terms merely scientific and material; terms that say nothing about our lives.
Analú Laferal and Tiagx Vélez’s film The Third World After the Sun takes us far away from these discussions, into the depth of the Colombian jungle, so dark that it almost feels beyond place: it could be anywhere, it could be nowhere. It’s a space of ritual and kink and heavy shadows. One that feels mysterious and primordial; like it’s always been there. Some of the aforementioned ideas about the origins of queerness, and therefore also this inherently queer space, are alluded to, but come together to make what the narrator—who speaks first in voice and then in subtitle, or maybe the voice changes, boundaries here are unclear—describes as a “cluster of vision”.
Likewise, Vélez and Laferal shoot this space from countless angles and formats. Each perspective doesn’t further define the precise contours of place, but instead shows that no matter how well rendered, edges cannot be drawn. Images, like words, feel like futile devices in the face of the messy miasma that makes up this distant reality.
Yet this distance is not exactly natural. This is a place without and against shape, and so the walls around it must have been constructed, in this case by the “foreign fear”—an imperialist force—and their “desire to lIve from our hearts”. Thus making the marginalisation of queerness inextricable from the construction and enforcement of the “global south”, or, as it was once more commonly called “the third world”. The title, then, frames this alienation as interplanetary, as existing on a different world entirely. Earth is also the third world from the Sun, making the jungle its kind of shadow side, an inversion.
Kink, too, is often understood as an inversion. A transgression of normative sexuality and therefore expressed—in a way not entirely dissimilar to transness—in relation to the society around it. Leading some, even within the queer community, to see it merely as an extension, to see BDSM, to choose an obvious example, as a continuation of the patriarchal force it’s in conversation with. But Vélez and Laferal show it emerging from a much deeper place, one explicitly connected with nature. We see a figure in full bondage suit licking the milky innards of a fruit, animalistic and primal, and up close, stretching latex looks a lot like light on rippling water, or the cavernous insides of an organ.
Far from constrictive, these rituals of sex are framed as a way to “rub your existence up against the immensity of the cosmos”; to orgasm is to go to a place, like the jungle itself, between dreams and death. It’s a giving over of your consciousness to something beyond words or knowledge, or to another person, allowing them to transgress what you once imagined as your boundaries and to reach inside of you, become a part of the same whole. All this to say: kink is shown as a way to find comfort in the eeriness of embodiment, to accept that transformation is an essential part of existence and that the lines between people and things and the world itself are much stranger and more elusive than they are usually drawn to be. With this acceptance comes a kind of transcendence: the tightly confining latex suddenly starts to stretch and expand, warping beyond shape.
However, this feeling of liberation is complicated by the final line of text, which reads “within, our placid and faint vengeance shall be”. Laferal and Vélez have looked as deeply inside as they can, but there is still an outside left ignored; a separate space is still a space separated. And so their short ends with an uncomfortable resonance, its all-consuming atmosphere of exploration, fear and pleasure seem suddenly less spacious and more limited. The paradise that was for fifteen minutes so immediate now feels distant and illusory. Which only makes more sense as I look up from my laptop and see the world around me, one where this kind of space, nevermind something beyond it, is hard to imagine. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. If anything, this fading effect only compels us to reach further. Maybe we should throw out our dildos and rally in the streets, but I think we have plenty of room to fit both.
Esmé Holden is a trans woman who writes about movies when she can. She is based in London. You can find her and her work in some places and not others.
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