Arriba Beach

Most stories start with a single image, a moment. The origin of this film was the first eye contact between Sam and Miguel, two strangers on a beach. Through this fleeting exchange we think we see everything we need to know, and we assume we know exactly where the story is going. But in this story, queerness is less about who you’re fucking and more about the way you can bend reality into something unforeseen.

Even though an apparently straight couple is the central part of this film, it’s not really telling a story about heterosexuality or showing queerness through a heteronormative lens. Rather, the film is saying: people live more queerly than you might assume. This kind of queerness can be a power. At first, it appears to be about a straight woman whose husband has hidden his desire for men, and who manipulates other men to get what she wants. But both Adele and Sam are already through the looking glass – they’re the ones helping Santiago and Miguel explore and be more playful in their lives. Like Adele and Sam, the film uses appearances to upend social norms, undoing expectations through play.

What might be seen as deception could lead to the story being read through a lens of moralism, which is something we wanted to work against. So much storytelling around questions of identity can be freighted with anxiety and fears and insist on always showing where the harm is coming from next, while pleasure and playfulness often take a back seat. Remembering the all-too-common experiences of watching a film waiting for disaster to happen, we wanted instead to make a film where the appearance of harm is never actualized. It’s a story about cruising for pleasure, about the way anyone, no matter how normative they might seem, is capable of crossing boundaries in order to flourish and become truer to themselves.

Why a beach? Why a hotel? Being on holiday, and especially in hotels, we become someone else. We outsource domestic life and become sovereign for a while. When you aren’t thinking about your basic needs, what do you actually want? In the liminal space of the beach and hotel, Adele and Sam are tricksters. They alchemize their own and other people’s desires. Tricksters are figures who confront people with their choices, pushing them through playful manipulation. They are neither good nor bad. They are agents of change and growth when things have become static and fixed. How can you bend the world in your direction and undo its material and contractual rules?

This is a puzzle for all of us. How can we cross boundaries without being frozen by fear of risk? How can we get what we want without the moralism that traps us in place, and which we use to trap others as well? In many parts of the film, the audience might feel invited to sort characters and actions into moral categories such as good and bad. But if only you suspend the wish to judge, perhaps we can all dream of queerer futures, where people stop policing others through their fears about desire.