MAKING QUEEN RAQUELA
by director olaf de fleur

MAKING QUEEN RAQUELA
In my first visit to Cebu City in the Philippines, I happened to be walking in one of the poor neighbourhoods when I where I saw three girls who were at odds with the location. They were dressed more like famous movie stars than someone on an every-day stroll in amongst the locals in Cebu City.

This caught my attention as anything with such contrasts often bears a light of a possible film. The girls turned out the be Transgender girls, men, saying they had "a soul of a woman", to explain it for me, the average layman.

I went on the Internet to find interesting subjects, as I often do when I research for a film, I use the web. There I spoke with about 30 Tgirls in the Philippines and there was one in particular that caught my attention for how smart, charming and creative she was. I established a film crew in Cebu City Philippines were she lived, Raquela Rios, who by birth-name is called Earvin.

I started filming her life and her friends. As a filmmaker I had finished four feature docs in three years, and thought I was going on towards the fifth with "Raquela". However, the more I filmed, I realised I was not interested in doing another doc on "life-is-so-hard" for Tgirls. I learned that Raquela and many of her likes were chasing an impossible dream, being biologically men, their deepest wish was to find a heterosexual man to marry. That seemed like a snake eating it's tail syndrome.

NARRATIVE WITH A DOC STYLE
I was stranded, I did not want to make a documentary and I didn't have money to make a narrative feature. After weeks of self-debate I decided to make up my own genre, and put a label on it, calling it a "visiomentary" - I simply put it there so I would allow myself to do anything I wanted to do, to tell the story as vividly as possible.

I decided that Raquela would act partly as herself, her friends also, and then I'd bring in actors, even amateurs, mainly to make the story roll forward. I casted our production designer as a security guard, an Austrian hotel owner in Cebu who had a life-long dream of acting as Johnny K the porn photographer, my grandmother, my film mentor in Iceland as an ill tempered boss, and last but not least I'd cast my very good friend and filmmaker Stefan Schaefer in New York as the evil Michael, the Internet Pimp who would play a key-role in the film regarding Raquela's destiny.

Before I casted, I had done extensive research on the lives of Tgirls in the Philippines, and it seemed that few cautionary tales always came up. They would usually mixture of trying to get by working on the streets, few "lucky" ones would be saved from the streets into the arms of Internet porn. And even fewer would have the luck to be invited by a Westerner to Europe or America, something that usually would result in a few days visit and being sent back. There seemed to be no happy ending to be found, but yet the "girls" were always very cheerful and full of joy though accompanied by a spoon of self-destructiveness.

I decided to make a loose screenplay "on the fly" while we were filming, to combine the most common stories and make one film, starring Raquela, representing her sisters and their stories in the Philippines. Few cautionary tales, one story.

THE STORY
I wrote the story, Raquela would represent mentioned cautionary tales of Tgirls, starting at the bottom as street prostitute going to Internet porn and hopefully be saved to travel abroad to seek her prince and her dreams.

In real life, Raquela is not a prostitute, though she has "the occasional flirt and meet with Westerners in Cebu City". The best thing I had in her was a great actress, very talented and full of ideas, and she was a Tgirl, who better to play the part?

She once told me that she had often dreamt of being the "Queen of Spain", I therefore wrote a little fairy-tale for her, called "The Amazing Truth about Queen Raquela", a little children story that would fit her destiny that society had cornered her in, objectifying her and her sisters to a point of violence, so much that schools or jobs were not offered to her likes, only the Porn-industry knocking on the door as means to make a living.

MOTIVATION AND METHOD
I fell in love with Raquela and the story she represented. Coming into the world with so many odds against her encouraged me to do the best film possible as a human to a fellow human. I was more and more convinced not to make a documentary, but wanted to keep the story as real as possible.

I therefore decided to use the "fly on a wall" filming method, keeping a distance to any actor, use talking heads as little as possible, and use three methods for every scene, either improve the scene, write it or even just put actors in a situation and see what came out of it. Therefore the "screenplay" was very loose and with a lot of possible outcomes for each scene. The main thing was to trust a "gut" I had and just breath with the story, be spontaneous, don't follow any rules I had regarding aesthetics or methouds and see what would happen.

SHOOTING THE FILM
Few samples from the way I'd work would be for example to ask our production designer to put on a security guards jacket and see if he could act for a scene where the audience learns that Raquela quit her school and is not doing drugs by talking to her friend the security guard. The main reason was to "see it" but not get it from a talking head.

Another example is when we were filming, Raquela had a car accident, putting her on crouces for few weeks. Instead of telling the audience about it, I wanted to see the accident, and found a stunt man in the Philippines to remake the accident for the audience. The stuntman I found is a story by itself, a man called Mike Stone did the stunt, not many know that he was a kung-fu legend, best friends with Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris and did many stunts for their films, Mike also won 92 competitions in the 70's, no second place trophies.

On few occasions I'd use real life methods, most notably when Raquela goes and does and HIV test, this was very emotional for everybody in the film, the strain was most on Raquela herself, admitting she lived a dangerous life-style of not using condoms. This is was the only scene where we'd put Raquela in such a position, she wanted to do it, and we filmed it, leading to a powerful on-screen moment.

GENRE VS FILM
My intention was not to make an hybrid, only to make a powerful film with very limited resources and try to free myself from the "do and don't"'s of film making and make a strong narrative. I find it important to say how I did the film, since it's been often confused as a documentary. The film is simply a narrative, cooked with creative methods of a poor filmmaker.