It is a sultry summer night in a villa in Hollywood. An escort is hired to give the client, a film director, the illusion he has paid for. “I’ll make you a star,” he promises, but soon the first chords of a revenge story strike, inverting the power dynamic.

A celebration of queer and drag culture, and of the psycho-emotional tension embedded into the gender hierarchy in Hollywood. This is how the short film by actor and now director Antonio Marziale (known from the Netflix film Alex Strangelove (2018)) can be described. The film, which screened in Sundance and Berlin, tackles the symbolism of drag and of transformation in an intimate way, and its mechanisms reveal that, which is poignantly tragic, lonely and, yes, also life-affirming.