La Lupe, production still [Enlarge in New Window]

Ela Troyano: La Lupe

Lupe Victoria Yoli, known as La Lupe, is one of the original 19 entries that defines "camp," at least according to Susan Sontag in her seminal 1964 essay "Notes on Camp." This sums up what most people know about the Afro-Cuban pop singer, who fled her homeland during the 1960 revolution and landed in the middle of New York's Latin music scene. Filmmaker Ela Troyano is hoping to change that with her documentary La Lupe, to air on public television in 2003.

"She was part of a Latino generation that never got attention," says Troyano, who was a pioneer in the Latin and gay film scenes with her films Latin Boys Go to Hell (1997) and Carmelita Tropicana (1994). Although La Lupe is a precursor for much of the new generation of Latin music, the only overt legacy she has isn't about that. Rather, as Troyano notes, "To do drag in the Latino world is to do La Lupe."

Troyano, who emigrated from Cuba as a child in the '60s, first saw La Lupe telling her life story at a church in The Lower East Side in 1987, shortly before her death.

Troyano, who was in a writing workshop at the time, held on to the material through the 1990s as she built her cinematic career. First she directed the short Carmelita Tropicana, a story based on the antics of the eponymous lesbian performance artist who happens to be Troyano's sister. Then she wrote and directed her debut feature, Latin Boys Go to Hell, which was released nationally in 1997. She also directed the Telemundo television series Reyes y Reyes and Angeles.

La Lupe started out as a fictional film. Like all of Troyano's work, it was going to be a hybrid -- at once narrative, documentary, mockumentary, and performance piece. Early in the process, however, Troyano decided that La Lupe's life was dramatic enough on its own, and that she would concentrate on making a documentary.

"The way I planned to do it was always supposed to be a little unconventional," she says. "But then I fell in love with the archival materials I found -- the testimonials and the music video clips and I thought it would be interesting to make a documentary with a dramatic-fiction structure." She adds, "I'm interested in how we use music to remember certain emotional moments."

La Lupe will include interviews with people like director Pedro Almodovar, who will talk about the singer's cultural significance. Troyano is also working on special effects for the archival material. And she's negotiating with La Lupe's family and the myriad entities that hold the rights to her music to secure songs for the film. "I'm meeting a lot of interesting characters," she notes. But she's finding some elements of documentary production challenging, such as not being able to move elements around as easily as in fiction. "And you're also working with so much material you didn't make yourself."

But in the end, she's letting La Lupe's story tell itself. "Her story is incredibly dramatic," she says, "and her songs paralleled her life."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Film / Video > Film / Video | History | New York | 2000