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There is a store in Palermo unlike any other called Quir, a place of love defying any convention. The owners are Massimo and Gino, who have been together for forty-two years, perhaps the longest-lasting gay couple in Italy. Quir is a proud revindication of life lived outside of norms … an overwhelming journey into the heart of a community which has decided to come out into the open to shout about its right to exist.

In his latest film, Bellucci seems to urge us to observe the world through the eyes of his queens, a colourful world built upon solidarity, acceptance, tolerance and a cathartic helping of humour. Their bodies become vessels and archives of a past full of pain and violence, but also light-heartedness and freedom; of battles to assert their right to be unashamedly diverse in a world which would have us all docile and obedient.

The Quir becomes an exciting microcosm full of colorful, heartwarming and conscience-awakening characters. They are verses by Nino Gennaro, a poet from Corleone who died of AIDS in and who wrote dazzling aphorisms such as «either you are happy or you are complicit,» to be found in his «jewel-active booklets» that he personally distributed to friends.

This is where friends like Ernesto, Vivian, and Charly meet, all people who are not described in the film but brought out through the gestures of their daily lives, which are in fact political acts of fighting for their rights in a Sicily — and in an Italy — still dominated by a patriarchal culture.

Bellucci lets us into their homes and lets us breathe in their love, difficulties, moments of mourning and existential reflections on the masculine and the feminine. There are also testimonies from young trans and gay men, giving the measure of how much the condition of this community has changed in the last forty years, but also how certain aspects remain unchanged.

It is a film about the human beauty of its characters, studded with humorous moments that keep the work in a light tone. Because the scene is on fire!

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Filmmaker Nicola Bellucci has created a cinematic monument to the couple, their surroundings, and their store, which sparkles with charm and wisdom. Which prefers the fragment to the totality. It always starts with love. This time I «fell in love» with Massimo and Gino.

I soon realized that what was supposed to be a store for handbags and other leather goods was actually a kind of confessory, or an emergency room for souls in need of help — the owners with a 40 years long history of struggling for LGBT rights. So I listened, and from this microcosm the characters soon multiplied, becoming pieces of a puzzle to be built against the backdrop of a landscape the city of Palermo.

Thus came Vivian and Ernesto and then Charly as well. I have tried to look at these lives following the lesson that it is never a matter of reproducing reality as it is, or of bending it to a pre-established ideological conception, but of filtering it through the prism of consciousness.

The connection between the characters in the film is not given by the fixation of positions or focal centers but by the movement, the restlessness between the poles, their existential precariousness. The individual stories all take place at the same time, and the transition from one to the other occurs through a series of artifices of a narrative, visual, or associative order: it will always be some detail, seemingly insignificant, that will transport us from one story to the next.

Each story goes in search of meaning aspiring, like the film, to recompose itself into a geometry whose meaning is given by the whole, by the individual fragments that through interlocking work weave the thread of the discourse. The montage thus becomes allegorical, interpretive: it also resorts to parody and irony as stylistic means.

Massimo Milani often repeated to me this phrase from his poet friend who died of AIDS so many years ago, pointing out the importance of approaching gender issues from, shall we say, a «positive» point of view. As Paul Preciado rightly points out, it is about avoiding «a gaze that kills» which he calls «necropolitical» which is what is often used in the cinematic representation of the Queer world.

I hope that I have succeeded in conveying in my film the active joy, as Nino Gennaro would say, that emanates from each of the bodies that cross the threshold of the Quir. As with his earlier works, a chance encounter led Nicola Bellucci to the subject of his new film. This time it happened in Sicily.

It was there that he met Gino and Massimo, two pioneers of the Italian gay movement. They run a leather goods store in Palermo called Quir which is frequented by many people from the queer scene. Some of them are the protagonists of this film. Gino, Massimo, Viviane, Ernesto and Charly are very engaging, flamboyant and sharp personalities who have touching and important stories to tell and are also blessed with a lot of wit and esprit.