At SXSW, An Honest Look at a Latina Transgender Bar in Transition

by Jamilah King
Friday, March 9 2012, 8:49 AM EST

http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/03/wildness_interview_sxsw.html

Wu Tsang didn't exactly plan to make a film. He wanted to host a party. It was an effort to celebrate a bar called the Silver Platter, a landmark in Los Angeles's historically Latino MacArthur Park neighborhood.

For over four decades, the bar had become a haven for the city's Latino transgender community. So Tsang, a Chinese American transgender organizer and activist who'd moved to Los Angeles from Chicago, helped start a weekly party called "Wildness" that quickly became one of LA's most talked about underground hotspots.

That, of course, brought along problems. The space, the neighborhood, and its women were in transition, caught in a web of shifting demographics and backwards immigration policies. "Wildness", Tsang's first feature length film, is a love story based on his relationship with the Silver Platter. It's set to premiere today at SXSW, and he spoke to Colorlines.com.

Living in Mess: 'Wildness'
By Andy Campbell, 3:51PM, Mon. Mar. 12

http://www.austinchronicle.com/blogs/sxsw/2012-03-12/living-in-mess-wildness/

A gold-glitter sign hanging at the back of the stage in The Silver Platter bar in Los Angeles reads: "El show de Morales y sus Geishas."
None of the women performers, largely transgender and first- or second-generation immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, and beyond, remark on being dubbed (or dubbing themselves as) "geishas," those archetypal Japanese servant-prostitutes over-romanticized for centuries by Western imperial powers. It's one of many instances of the complexity of performed identity left unexplained in Wu Tsang's first feature-length documentary, Wildness. And thanks be to Wu.

There is a common misconception in documentary-making that a dictionary or field guide is needed to make sense of cultural spaces (only deemed subcultural by those who believe they are comfortably residing in the norm) such The Silver Platter. Magically, the bar is a character herself, speaking in dulcet Spanish, which is one of the many innovative moves Wu Tsang and his collaborators make here to address the unspoken and the unknown.