Anahí Bernieri, one of the most accomplished and influential voices in Argentine feminist cinema, is no stranger to gender and sexual outlaws. In A Year Without Love (2005), she portrays Pablo (a gay poet moonlighting as a French tutor) exploring connection, lust, and physical reclamation through Buenos Aires’s underground leather scene in light of his HIV diagnosis. The film is narrated through Pablo’s lyrical diary entries where he expresses his profound yearning for life and connection. We follow him through the techno clubs, his numerous hospital visits, and the hot S/M scenes that allow him to reconnect with his sexuality. The film offers a sensitive, humanizing portrayal of someone whose existence had been deeply marginalized for not aligning to patriarchal scripts. In a way, Anahí Bernieri’s more recent Alanis (2017) operates as a companion piece: it also refutes victimization, asserts agency, and calls out the tyrants—all with warm compassion.
Alanis centers around its eponymous character, a Buenos Aires sex worker and young mother of 18-month-old Dante, as she navigates the fallout of a police raid that intended to “rescue” her from exploitation. It is one of the very few films that explicitly engages with the contemporary discourse regarding sex work criminalization that is disguised as well-intentioned saviorism. Filmed in collaboration with Argentina’s main sex worker union, AMMAR (Asociación de Mujeres Meretrices de Argentina), the film directly responds to those who insist that sex workers’ safety lies at the hands of the punitive state, chiefly the government and carceral feminists, and at times portrays situations that seem to be directly inspired by parts of their Report on Institutional Violence Against Sex Work in Argentina.
However, Alanis is far from a preachy pro-decrim piece. The film tenderly focuses on Alanis the person, the mother, the friend. One standout sequence sees Alanis awkwardly trying to position her baby for breastfeeding before her upcoming session with a client. After she’s done, she informs her fellow working friend Gisela that she could only breastfeed from one boob; Gisela diligently assures her that she’s already whipping him up some mashed potatoes as she fills a pot of water to boil his binkies. With these touching glimpses into Alanis’s life, we can’t help but feel deeply bonded to her. We fiercely root for her. We ache, cry, and rage for her. We want her and Dante to find security just as badly as she does.
Alanis pulls us away from the detached discourse of sex work criminalization by demonstrating what police saviorism looks like in practice—the destabilization of families, the fragmentation of communities, and further precarity in the lives of people working sex—in vivid, sensitive, and gut-wrenching detail.
Alanis screens this evening, October 2, at Anthology Film Archives as part of the series “Avatars of the Whore.”
