‘The film was a reclamation of this right to imagine our lives, our stories’: Kani Lapuerta on ‘Niñxs’

Researcher and filmmaker Kani Lapuerta spent eight years creating his debut film Niñxs with Karla Bañuelos, a trans girl we follow from childhood through adolescence in her hometown of Tepoztlán, Mexico—and someone Lapuerta knows quite personally. This connection translates clearly onscreen: the film operates in several layers, including an overlaid narration composed as a quippy conversation between older Kani and older Karla looking back on their lives as they grew together over the years and sharing memories as trans individuals in different stages of their lives. Other moments incorporate fictional elements, such as when Karla kills the men who verbally harass her on the street before flouncing away to practice her cheer routine.

Niñxs is reminiscent of the pop princess energy and trans joy of feature fiction coming-of-age flick Alice Júnior (2019) by Gil Baroni, both of which are complete with get-on-your-feet banging soundtracks. On the occasion of the world premiere of Lapuerta’s film at Visions du Réel in Nyon, Switzerland, Purple Hour sat down with the filmmaker to discuss the vitality of the connection between himself and his subject Karla, the queerness of playing with time, and the importance of reclaiming childhood sensibilities.

Purple Hour: You’ve spoken about knowing Karla since she was very little. I’d love to learn more about how your relationship transformed over the course of the project. Later on in the film, she says that you’re like an uncle to her—and that’s a very precious statement.

Kani Lapuerta: I think since we met also with Karla’s parents, we formed a very strong bond—especially with Karla’s mom. I think we connected a lot, and we started to do many things together. I used to live in the city where they lived, in Tepoztlán, and they used to come all weekends to cook in a street market. They used to make pizzas in this street market in the city centre, so Karla would stay all weekend with me for years. We wrote the scripts and showed the stories that she was inventing. The film is a very small part of our relationship. It’s like maybe 10 percent, even if it has, during all these years, been something that was floating in there. The relationship we have has been growing for all these years is like we’re family. I think also with Karla living in Tepoztlán, she doesn’t have many trans people to relate to. So I think even if our experiences are so different, there is something that we can link together.

You’re a first-time filmmaker, and your very long process is also an inspirational story from a production standpoint. How did this look like from the very beginning?

I didn’t know anything about filmmaking [when I started]. I had been a character in two documentaries, many years ago when there were not so many trans men visible. I liked the experience of showing the film and seeing what it generates. I thought, why are there not trans people making films? I started to think that I wanted to make a film that had another gaze. I think cis people have a lot of interest in trans experiences, but they have a very [specific view]. They want to know when you take your hormones. They want to know if you have had surgery. They want to know your dead name. And this is something very small from the [entirety of the] trans experience. It’s very reductionist. We deserve imagination. We deserve to imagine our feelings, not to be imagined by other people. When I met Karla, I was fascinated by her and her innocence. I said, “Let’s make a film where you can see a kid that has freedom to express herself in the way that she wants.” It was my film school. I studied pedagogy before, so I’ve been working with kids a lot, and I think that helped me relate to Karla.

I saw that you went through a number of pitching forums as you were creating the film. Were you meeting people and building collaborators this way?

I did a workshop with a collective that makes communal cinema in Mexico, called La Sandía Digital. I really like the way they think about filmmaking. They are very much out of the industry, and they use a more collaborative way of thinking. They work with communities in the whole country. I propose the film to them, so they are the production company—but they are not a production company. They are more like an activist collective. With them, we started to think about the film. This also influenced the way we saw the film, like a more collaborative film together with Karla. I started to apply for workshops at festivals in Mexico, and I started to see this other way of filmmaking that’s more industry-focused, or hierarchical. But it also helped a lot to build up the vision, the aesthetics, the narrative. I have these very political thoughts of wanting to make a collaborative film and so on, but I didn’t have the [right tools] to make a more playful structure. I think the workshops helped a lot, and then I also applied for a master’s in documentary filmmaking. There, I learned a lot. I related with other filmmakers, and I could develop more of the idea, which was very cool.

On the idea of imagination in the film: the fictionalised portions of the film are very thoughtfully integrated. Karla’s online social media presence also has a very strong component of imagination. I’m curious as to your thoughts on this theme as it connects to the film.

I think imagination is always linked to kids and children. As you grow, you lose this imagination. It was kind of like a reclamation of being able to imagine, reclaiming of being able to be a kid, because in the adult world when you say “This guy is a kid”, it’s something very pejorative. But I think that during the process of growing up, we lose so many things, and we lose the right to imagine. I think trans people, because of the reality of our lives, we also miss this right to imagine. The film was a reclamation of this right to imagine our lives, our stories, or whatever we want. Because we are somehow forced to be activists and forced to have this political discourse and forced to defend our rights, we forget to imagine other things, which is something very powerful.

There’s this idea of queer futurity from cultural theorist José Esteban Muñoz—that imagining the future is a radical act in some cases. Karla has this idea of imagining her death in the film, but you touch on this by saying you don’t want to look at that footage. But instead, in a more joyous form, you play a lot with timelines and imagining the future in different ways.

Many cultures don’t see time the way Western cultures see it. I think right now we have to break this up. Many Indigenous cultures propose to put ancestral practices in front, to stop thinking about the future the way we are thinking about it now. Stop thinking about the future as destruction, as destruction is sought by Western culture and colonialism. This film was also a way to reclaim this childhood that is in the past, but it could be a target [to reach] instead of something to leave behind. Something we thought from the beginning with La Sandía Digital is to think of the film as a tool to detonate conversation about the way we create narratives around trans life—and the way families also relate to education. I think these are the two main ideas that can be debated and grow conversation around the film. We thought about this impact campaign on the educational side, like schools and cultural spaces, to be a tool for an already existing network of trans collectives and so on to use it to explain what they have been doing for many years.

We also want to build a trans filmmaker network in Mexico. There are not so many trans filmmakers, but there are a lot of very creative trans people who want to make films but are not. Filmmaking is a very elitist space. We would like to also question these spaces—question the industry and the festivals, why they don’t have any programmers or trans people in decision-making. Maybe they have some trans people in other spaces, but it’s something they don’t question themselves. This is another thing we want to bring the conversation around. Where are the trans filmmakers in Mexico and in the world?