In the city of São Paulo two stories are interconnected by a decadent building within the city’s downtown sex district. Lily and Miranda live door to door. Lily has always been somewhat foolish, but after the removal of her breasts due to cancer, her journey takes a different course: she falls in love with Miranda, a transvestite who works as a reseller of transvestite accessories. Miranda goes through hard times: her boyfriend is in jail and she decides to turn herself in at the station where he is being held, in an innocent effort to remain close to him. While incarcerated, she is rejected by her boyfriend and raped by all of his cellmates. Lily decides to help Miranda, but for that she must build a new identity that can be respected in that underworld. Lily dresses as a man. Miranda, already out, begins to use violent methods to dominate other transvestites, becoming the most feared bawd downtown. The transvestites get together to come up with a plan to kill her. Lily asks for the help of the Dragonflies, malformed transvestites who hide in the city’s Central Park. The Dragonflies help Lily find Miranda and tell her about the ambush. Miranda doesn’t listen and is attacked by a large group of transvestites armed with razors.
Lily finds Miranda again at the park. Miranda is completely destroyed, her gaze seems to be off. Lily promises to take care of Miranda forever. Both of them just sit there, man and woman, two armours torn and inverted, like Adam and Eve, in a dirty paradise in downtown São Paulo.

While in Russia, during the first FrameWork workshop, I had a dream. I woke up in the middle of the night to jot it down on a notebook; I always do that, I have a Jungian therapist. The following day when I returned to the second script discussion with Franz Rodenkirchen, it felt like a cinematographic therapy session. In my dream, I had inherited the body of a transvestite to direct my film. To inherit this body meant to wear it, experience it, feel it under my skin, make gestures and walk with it; it meant to understand why I always throw my hands up in the air like Carmen Miranda and why my shoes need to be sturdy. At the end of the day I looked for the transvestite so I could give her back the body, completely worn out. She had left me a note: “My dear, now it’s definitely yours.”

Lily and the Dragonflies is an immersion into the underworld of transvestites in downtown São Paulo, a world made up of fables and urban tales. It is where ghouls and ghosts with no official identity reside; most of their bodies are given pauper’s burials; most often than not, their unsolved murders turn into statistics for they are seldom investigated because, as the cops say, “each corpse gives out its own stink”. The stories of the downtown transvestites are basically orally transmitted. Their memories live on in the tales passed on by the survivors, embellished with tragic, fantastical undertones, sometimes to serve as a warning to the younger ones and to remind them of the path of those who fell into this life, like Alice fell into the hole in the search for the White Rabbit. These are my heroines, those who reinvented themselves, building up a kind of armour that allows them to survive in this world without becoming anonymous victims.

Lily and the Dragonflies is a story about the love of a woman for a transvestite, a story that follows the deconstruction of a suit of armour and the construction of a new one. Miranda, the transvestite, must face everything and everyone so that she can be close to the man she loves, even at the cost of her own life. And Lily, who needs to reinvent herself, creates a suit of armour so she can set out on her journey out into the world in the search for Miranda.

To shoot a transvestite is to capture two presences in one body and that alone is a nature’s event. Formality may help me balance such a strong image, for we will be working with transsexual actresses. They always say with irony and humour: “If you’re working with transvestites, work with us, it will be cheaper because the special effects are already built-in”. The journey of Lily and the Dragonflies is full of little details and great learning experiences.