Domestic bliss and a fruitful career collide with latent trauma and erotic expression in the teaser trailer for Argentine helmer Javier Van de Couter’s latest project, “Thesis on a Domestication” (“Tesis sobre una domesticación”), shared exclusively with Variety.
Backed by Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna’s ambitious Mexican production company La Corriente del Golfo (“State of Silence”), the film will compete for the Q Hugo Award, bowing globally as it screens within the LGBTQ+ focused Outlook program at the Chicago International Film Festival, running Oct.16-27, before heading on to Morelia.
Buenos Aires-based Aurora Cine founder Laura Huberman (“El perro que no calla”), Ramiro Pavón at Argentina’s Oh My Gomez! Films (“El perfecto David”), Van de Couter and La Corriente del Golfo’s Lorena Cándano de la Peza, Mónica Pérez and Kyzza Terrazas produce the project alongside Bernal and Luna, their companies’ ever-championing bold narratives that add to the cannon of boundary-pushing Latin cinema.
The narrative is based on a forthcoming novel written by acclaimed trans multi-hyphenate Camila Sosa Villada-set for English-language publication by Riverhead Books in 2026. Her prior work “Las Malas” earned FIL Guadalajara’s Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Barcelona’s Finestres de Narrativa and Paris’ L’Héroïne Madame Figaro accolades.
Sosa Villada, Van de Couter, and Huberman worked together on the screenplay, which follows a famous trans actress lunging towards a well-earned, promising future while the smoldering embers of her past continue to shape her in more ways than she can count, her body acting as a conduit of her metamorphosis. A process over three years in the making, the team curated a protagonist brimming with boundless agency, the role naturally played by Sosa Villada herself.
“Making the adaptation with Camila was a privilege for Laura and me, mainly because in that transition from literature to film we never forget that it’s a story invented by a trans person to talk about another trans person, as authentic and disconcerting as that is for cinema,” Van de Couter told Variety.
“The challenge was not losing the vitality, the layers, the poetry, eroticism and ambiguity that the novel has. The film, through its staging, points out a kind of observation and distance, which the novel proposes by being narrated in the third person,” he added.
Van de Couter and Sosa Villada previously teamed when he cast her for a key role in his debut film-2011’s “Mía,” which picked up Best Feature plaudits at the Guadalajara International Film Festival and Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival while earning the Jury Prize at Chéries-Chéris.
Opposite Sosa Villada is her suave and stable love interest, a Mexican lawyer played by Ozark mainstay Alfonso Herrera. His steady uniformity challenges her inhibition and, as they grow further into monogamy-hurling toward parenthood, tensions mount amidst compromise.
Scenes of celebration, public adoration, seduction and romance mingle in the film’s tease – as its lead traverses a thorny yet exhilarating path toward self-acceptance. Glimpses of past traumas and ongoing tribulations are thrown into balance the full breadth of a character striving to solidify her dominion. The film combines two oft-inharmonious worlds – one of matrimony, motherhood and the responsibilities of a vast career, the other a sharply contrasting, carefree life of untethered personal expression. The luxe urban trappings of Buenos Aires and the vast, vivid mountain landscapes of her rural hometown serve as conflicting backdrops.
“The protagonist’s decisions reveal her attempt to maintain a balance between aspects of her life that can be perceived as incompatible. The viewer accompanies these decisions, often linked to not losing parts of her wildest essence, which domestication seems to threaten. The way of life that she managed to earn through her talent also deviates from a more obvious narrative and from a destiny that seems to be written in advance for trans people,” Van de Couter explained. “These digressions that break into her domesticated life are a cry not to lose herself, they’re an imperative and poetic need that allow her to enjoy without guilt. Her past seems to threaten everything she was able to achieve. Living on that edge puts her at risk, but at the same time gives her the power of being whole.”
As delicate as it is defiant-at times aspirational, “Thesis on a Domestication” questions the components of a fully satiating life while positing that remaining true to self is the most rewarding act of rebellion against conformity – allowing trans pain, joy, hardship and triumph to take up space simultaneously, unapologetically.
“Cinema that deals with queer themes is often expected to be festive, and when that expectation is met, it can be very attractive. Fantasy and joy are the tools that our queer community uses to survive stigmas and prejudices, and that joy often seeps onto the screen,” Van de Couter relayed.
“What’s important is that there’s a diverse cinema that talks about trans people without always looking at them as compassionate, scandalous, marginal. We need a cinema that shows these lives without disguise. When a transgender person walks in front of a camera, it immediately creates a hypnotic, poetic, unique effect on the viewer that fills me with joy every time it happens,” he added.