Roberto Pérez Toledo looked and rolled from the height of a wheelchair.
A congenital spinal atrophy would leave him there, but perfectly erect, since he turned 14.
And from this watchtower the reverse he would build a universe as personal as unique –amable, happy and injured – on the war against exclusion, the phrases made and destinations that are too written.
His was a world meticulously raised from the clarity of muscular and free bodies, the tense or just declared desires and, hurrying, the uninhibited pleasure of the venéreo fragor.
The filmography of it is distributed in three feature films (two solo and one set) and infinity of short launched, rather than only filmed, as proclaimed, as simply screaming.
‘Gritons’ is the title of one of them, not by force the most celebrated, but the most evident of all of them.
On Monday, last day of January, he died. He had just been released at the Teatro María Guerrero de Madrid basic manual of signs language to break hearts and had announced on Monday from the death of him an act at the Academy of Cinema. He had been born on April 3, 1978 in Lanzarote and a recent stroke left him without options. He would have turned 44 years soon. That is, he would have stayed, if we pay attention to IMDB, to two of equalize the number of films made. It was, indeed, prolific. But above all, he was passionate. He liked to remember that he had begun at the cinema from perhaps before having awareness of himself. But instead of, like so many others, yield to hypnotic pleasure and ‘voyeur’ from the dark room, he was clear that he wanted to be on the other side. Despite everything and, before against all, with everyone. Each of his films was from very soon, from his debut in 1999 with ‘Sea Intro’, an explosion of himself to become what right now, which is no longer, will be forever: an unreversionable reference not only from cinema LGTBI +, but of everyone’s cinema, for everyone, with everyone and, why not, on top of all.
Soon, in 2011, I would debut with its first feature film, ‘six points over Emma’.
In it, the unauthorized imagination of her and ease of her was aimed at approaching comedy from that point of bitterness that makes her real, close, almost tactile.
There was the story of a blind young man (an unleashed echegui veronica) insigned on being a mother above limitations and phrases made.
Who knows if in the character protagonist of her movie there were not already projected many of her longings, each and every one of her convictions.
Or maybe not.
Maybe it was just a story more of the infinity of them that burned him.
Be that as it may, the tape, which was seen in the Malaga festival, already exhibited anything disguised by letting the bodies speak on the other side of the impositions of the framing.
Pérez Toledo cinema was a torrent of freedom, ideas, kindly feigned and serious kindness.
Two years later he would participate in the collective film ‘in the end everyone killed’ and we would have to wait until 2017 to enjoy (it is an enjoyable cinema albeit slightly uncomfortable) of ‘like the foam’.
The director lamented without really doing it of all that the film had ended up by chance of commerce and the flesh in some other porn website.
And here, let’s admit it, virtue.
Although not exempt from an indisarately fetish wink, ‘like the foam’ hides more than teaching, it suggests more that says, fun rather than heating.
The whole movie is nothing more than an orgy, with all its power of liberation and promise.
Faced with an orgy, there are no pockets in which to hide sweaty palms of hands and bodies are thrown pure, hard and clean to be in a territory by definition necessarily new.
And virgin despite everything.
This was how Francesc Bellmunt understood when in 1978, in the middle of the Spanish transition, he staged the dreams of democracy to come in a cheerful nonsense of orgasms and heaters (with final disappointment and everything) and so he understood Pérez Toledo.
His film is manifesto ‘queer’ and proclamation of new senses.
His film is pure exclamation of affections.
The film of it proposes a free space in which identities are recognized, embrace and rise.
And they love each other.
His movie is the evidence of a firm man standing at the obligation of a world without a wheelchairs.
Or, better, each with his, all roll.
Rolling that was the only one who always kept Pérez Toledo firm.
In his last short, surrendered homage to his land, to Lanzarote.
‘Before the eruption’ tells the story of a group of excursion friends by the desolate and sickly beautiful place of an island that is a volcano and upside down.
One of them is really her.
She is in transition from being the woman she wants to be.
And it is there in desire as a certain promise, as a meeting place and recognition, where Pérez Toledo was always.
And she is.
Rolling.
D.E.P.
