FINLANDIA

The aftermath of an earthquake. In the town of Juchitán de Zaragoza a woman scrambles through the ruins of a house for a loved one. She searches frantically through the rubble, and then stops. She has found something. Someone. With her bare hands, she claws at the rubble, the masonry and the dust to uncover a body. A face. At first it appears to be the face of a man, then as she clears more of the dust, we see that it’s the face of a woman, her ears weighed down by large gold earrings, a dust encrusted garland in her hair. It is the face of DELIRIO, and she is dead.

We see that same face, alive and well, a few weeks earlier. She is dressed in a traditional Zapotec dress, her hair collected in that garland of flowers, her face made up. She sits at a dressing table and begins removing her make up. The more make up she takes off, the more she reveals masculine features, her jawbone, her nose, her mouth. Slowly, Delirio reveals herself to us as a man in middle age. Except that she is not a man, and neither is she a woman. She is a muxe. Arranged around the dressing table mirror are a series of postcards of a foreign country. She looks away from her own reflection to one of those cards. and picks one up. On the front of the postcard is an image of a forest landscape: pine trees, lakes, blue skies. Finland.