Filmmaker Julia Katharine (Tea for Two, "Won’t You Come Out To Play?", This Is Not Dancin Days) begins Vera: Ontem e Hoje with an admission: "Vera arouses ambiguous feelings in me...at the same time that i consider it a great film, for me, it is not an LGBTQIA+ film". From Julia's statement, we quickly realize that the historical legacy of Sergio Toledo's Vera (1984) is complicated. While the film is widely recognized as pioneering for its portrait of a young transgender man struggling to find their place in Brazilian society, its narrative and lead performance by Ana Beatriz Nogueira are perhaps open to scrutiny in the year 2021. In this new video piece, Julia Katharine invites her good friends Claudia Campolina & Daniel Veiga, both of whom are active in the Brazilian film industry and cinephiles in their own right, for a discussion about how the film should be newlyreceived today.


