Endless

In this defiantly trans and experimental vision of filmmaking, the nonbinary X embarks on a labyrinthine journey of bodies, sex and transformation. Made by a group of queer artists, this conceptual yet sensual dreamscape of a film forges a radical new cinematic language.

“Transition is not a fairytale. This change does not promise you anything,” a voiceover utters; a face is cradled by a lover, and the blurriness of their motions suggests that identity may never cohere. In Wojciech Puś’s Endless, the nonbinary X (Szymon Czacki) begins a relationship with the elusive, transgender Frank (Edmund Krempiński), and then meets M (Josef Ostendorf), an older, moneyed art collector. Yet this dreamscape of bodies, sex, top surgery scars, and oestrogen gel smeared over skin is just as much nightmare as it is pleasure. A powerful loneliness aches; the flashing strobes of a rave are undercut with the melancholy of a womb-like soundscape.

Conceptual monologues about desire and bodies are threaded through sensual imagery, and the film’s striking visuals – flowers burning in reverse, tangled lovers, black mould blooming on ceilings – speak to the imaginations of the group of queer artists, performers and sex workers that created it. Unsettling the idea of transition as linear arrival at a fixed destination, Endless reiterates the meaning of queerness as defying assimilation to existing narratives, defying legibility, defying capture. Like its title, it is both about the pain of irresolution and the strength of being reborn, again and again.

– Xuanlin Tham

Trailer

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