“Babylonia was made within the EICTV (International School of Cinema and Television of San Antonio de Los Baños). The school is located in a farm in the surroundings of a tiny city in the countryside of Cuba. While the isolation really helped us to plunge into our film projects, the lack of leisure options could be very hard to handle at times. You can imagine our excitement when we heard there was a drag show nearby. A tiny door in a deserted street led us to Babilonia, and being there felt like being in a whole other world, very different from the repressive and restrained society (despite all of the Cuban sympathy) we were used to. Here, queer people dressed and acted and flirted with an astounding and unseen liberty in the outside world. This fabulous universe really blew our minds, especially in the context of a society so deeply sexist and homophobic that it had forced labor camps for LGBT people up until the end of the 60s. Cuban drag queens, however, have managed not only to resist but to thrive through the dark ages, because they glow and know how to put on a show. They remain alive and well and even wealthier than most because they’re just too good at what they do. In one of our many Babylonian nights at Babylonia, there was a power outage that lasted nothing less than three hours. Amazingly, nobody left, and it was the best show we ever saw there, with the artists and the public performing with maximum levels of energy. The seed of our film was planted (and watered with rum) on that night, which, for me, was a live example of the‘firefly resistance’ of the transformistas (drag queens) that remain shining through any power outage or attempt of erasure throughout history. The melodrama that inspires the show also inspired our script and the performances of our actresses, who play themselves because they are just too good at doing that.