Silver Screen

 

“It began because I was looking for a place to start a party,” admits Los Angeles-based transgender performance artist, nightlife promoter, and independent filmmaker Wu Tsang of the origin of his latest project, the 25-minute short Damelo Todo, screening this June at the SoHo gallery Clifton Benevento, in conjunction with his residency at New York’s New Museum. The film was shot in the Westlake bar Silver Platter. “Then I got to know some of the patrons and realized that they all had really amazing stories about why they were there,” Tsang adds. These accounts of trans identity, family relations, and, in a moving last confession, survival of prison rape, are told in partly unsubtitled Spanish by the bar’s regulars and dissect their familiar, celebratory, and, at times, volatile relationship to the glitter-glazed club-turned-safe space.