By Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier

When describing her home city of Córdoba, Argentinian director Agustina Comedi presents a setting shaped by opposing forces. On one side, she illustrates a university culture that generated progressive political movements; on the other, a deeply entrenched Catholicism whose influence extended into every layer of daily life.

"There have been big political movements in Córdoba, but when you have this strong force that is oppressive," Comedi explains, "you have the opposite." It was amidst this tension, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, that one finds the queer underground performances at the heart of her documentary Playback.

The dawn of the twentieth century in this setting was one defined by intersecting branches of state-sanctioned intolerance and exclusion. Trans people in Córdoba faced compounding forms of marginalisation, which included being expelled from their families, forbidden from securing employment and generally stripped of treatment and resources that could keep them alive. As such, the AIDS crisis hit with particular brutality in provincial Argentina.

"The anti-retrovirus arrived to Buenos Aires at that time, but not to Córdoba," Comedi recalls of treatment options in the 1980s. "It was like a year of difference between the two areas; that year was terrible because lots of people died… lots, lots, lots." For those without the means to travel to the capital city for treatment, the delay was a death sentence.

Comedi's connection to this world is deeply personal. Her first feature film, 2017’s Silence Is a Falling Body, explored her father's queer life before she was born. It was during the production of this first foray into documentary filmmaking that she met the friends and lovers who had populated his past.

The last person she was introduced to was La Delpi, a trans woman who had been her father's partner. "No-one wanted to introduce me to her," Comedi says. "And I realised that there's a lot of transphobia inside our community." For the gay men around her father, she explains, "being friends with a trans woman was problematic for them because it became obvious that they belonged to a community. It has to do with visibility."

In stark contrast to the heightened degree of trans visibility within mainstream media and broader culture today, to be seen as different in any way in the 1980s Argentina was pointedly not a source of personal pride. It was something to keep hidden, in order to keep oneself safe from persecution. When Comedi and La Delpi finally met, they became close.

La Delpi showed Comedi the personal archive she had kept, including recordings of the drag and lip-sync performances she and her friends had staged in Córdoba's underground scene. "She showed me these archives, and we started to talk about them, and she wanted to do something," Comedi recalls. Together with La Delpi and her friend Lacolo, Comedi began reviewing the footage and recording their conversations as they revisited the material together. That process became the script for Playback.

Comedi made Playback during what she describes as a period of relative openness in Argentina, where a broadening provision of human rights protections allowed the country to come to terms with its authoritarian past. "In the moment I did the film, I think we were going through a spring regarding queer communities' rights, and human rights in general," she reflects. "Now there's a backlash, a very big backlash, with the right wing in power, and lots of hatred discourses," Comedi says.

Trans people in Argentina today face worsening conditions, including impeded access to housing, healthcare, and crucial anti-retroviral medication. All of these issues are compounded by an economic crisis that has only exacerbated every prior form of inequality. Within this closed-minded climate, also, came personal grief. La Delpi’s friend Lacolo passed away during the editing of the film.

In the years since its release in 2019, Playback has travelled well beyond the cinema circuit. Comedi reflects on the work she did with quiet pride, calling it "a very tender job," and one that was achieved in a collective effort. "Many people appropriated the film, and it was shown in different places that have nothing to do with cinema; in different organisations and activist spaces."

This second life afforded to the film, one rooted in community use rather than festival prestige, is what Comedi values most. Yet she remains candid about her relationship to awards more broadly. "I don't believe much in prizes," she admits. "Everything about red carpets has nothing to do with my life."

Yet she will concede the TEDDY AWARD is a unique honour within her career, with Playback taking home the Best Short Film prize in 2020. "I'm very proud,” she shares, “because the TEDDY means something for our community that is also meaningful for me. It's like a little hug."

What distinguishes the TEDDY among other awards bodies, in Comedi's view, is its political lineage. The TEDDY AWARD carries a 40-year tradition of recognising those films, and its creators, which push against the boundaries of narrative form and queer subject matter. "A political way of thinking in filmmaking. That's the origin of this award,” she says.

Today, with Argentina's cultural funding infrastructure under threat and national film institutes destabilised, Comedi finds herself thinking more urgently about the practical conditions of filmmaking. Her processes are long, often built around archival material and deep collaboration with disparate communities – and these practices are increasingly difficult to sustain.

Her advice to fellow filmmakers, then, is unsentimental but direct: to think about the material realities of production alongside the creative vision. The two must work in tandem, she maintains. "It's not that I suddenly got materialistic," she says. "It's that it's impossible to do films if you're not thinking about the material part of doing them. I think that we have to think about those processes before or at the same time as when we're in our creative process. Because our job is to do films.”