(Change of Sex)
Directed by Vicente Aranda
108 minutes
In Spanish with English subtitles

In these times of gender fluidity it's maybe a good moment to drag out this unbelievable Spanish film that documents a time when these issues were first beginning to nag our narrow-minded, conservative society. This flick is even more extreme if we consider it was made in mid-1970s Spain, a place that was just emerging from a 40-year dictatorship. With machismo very much the standard script for male behaviour, and homosexuality still illegal, you can imagine that this transgender flick came down like a bomb with the general public when it hit the screens.

This unusual flick stars a 17-year-old Victoria Abril, a sassy ballerina who went on to become the muse of Vicente Aranda and the superstar of Spanish mainstream films in the eighties. She would later play the roles of transgressive and assertive women in many progressive movies, not least those in mid-1990s Pedro Almodóvar. But here she is a male teenage student named Jose Maria whose feminine appearance gets him bullied in class. To make matters worse, his father decides to 'make a man of him' at a brothel/cabaret in Barcelona. Unwise decision. The rest of the film shoots off from there...

The film also features a real-life transvestite who performed in live sex shows under the artistic name of Bibí Andersen (wink, wink, Ingmar Bergman). Director Aranda discovered Andersen in one such sex show, and after this film Almodóvar would also pick her up to play lesbian women (!!?) in films such as The Law of Desire and High Heels. But it was Cambio de Sexo which first put the lives of Bibi and others like her on the silver screen, talking of sex change not just openly and explicitly, but also informatively. Many were lured into the cinema by the film's sexual explicitness, but once inside the movie theatre they just had to deal with its controversial subject matter.

This will be a rare screening of this visionary relic from Spain's past.