Following twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth de Victoria as she prepares for her debut performance, Babylonia (2024) glimpses briefly on the hectic behind-the-scenes of the largest drag show in the province of Artemisa, Cuba. In the span of one hot night, the film explores drag sisterhood, performance, and its chaos.
This documentary’s narrative unfolds from the perspective of Elizabeth: her experience and anxieties. Adding into the heat and chaos of the backstage dressing room are the fierceness of senior drag queens towards Elizabeth: inhospitality, sternness, and sharp-tongued taunts. At face value, there seems to be hostility towards how the other drag queens treat her. Why is that?
When one’s body and gender performance are their medium of art, precarity becomes embodied.
Drag is a culture built through struggle, born from the necessity of expression. Historically, drag has been a form of resistance against violence, harassment, and the means of exclusion. Drag shows and ballrooms, then, provide a platform for queer and trans people to find their own kind, self-acceptance, and resilience. As a culture positioned in the margins, senior queens have had to fight for survival, visibility, and respect amidst cis-heteronormative hostility even when drag is rising in mainstream culture (for example, through RuPaul’s). Their fierceness, then, becomes their way of life: as armor and as pedagogy.
Elders in drag often read* and throw shades at each other to see if they can own their stage and grow tougher skin. Through said fierceness that drag newcomers have to overcome, they too have to respect the lineage and learn about the herstory. Most of all, “hostility” towards newcomers function as a form of gatekeeping, to make sure that one is serious about the art form; preventing it from exploitation and appropriation by fame seekers and culture vultures. Hostility, then, turns into a rite of passage towards the values, history, and discipline that sustain drag as an art form.
In one scene in the film, Elizabeth asks her senior for nail glue because she forgot to bring hers. She sternly replied: “When you go somewhere for the first time, […] you need to bring your own stuff, okay? […] We all know you are new, but you need to learn.” In each cold criticism, hides a form of love that stings—for it takes many battle scars to make a good fighter. (Timmie) (Ed. Vanis)
*Reading is a drag term that refers to the common practice among drag queens of “confronting someone with witty and creative language that serves to cut or put someone down” (Jones, 2007).
Film Details
Babylonia (Babilonia)
Duda Gambogi | 23 min | 2024 | Brazil, Cuba
In Competition for Short Documentary
Festival Film Dokumenter 2025
