Waking Up in Vegas

A Swiss-born brother of Turkish descent and a teenager who likes to paint his nails.

Michèle Flury brightens up my Saturday morning and captures my heart with a short but impressive queer coming-of-age narrative.

Finnigan Inan and Fritz Rudolph fulfill their roles with a maturity unexpected for their age and take us back to our childhood for 15 minutes.

Although we are in 2024, a couple of teenagers dream of a career in the world of soccer, which is still as masculine as it was in the 50s... One of them has a Turkish family born in Switzerland, so he is already a minority, and the other is brave enough to confess that he finds his best friend beautiful and paint his nails, but also desperate enough to have to make up fake heterosexual sex stories.

Michèle Flury is aware that the change in society will not happen overnight, that it will happen with baby steps, and she has based her film on this...

Seeing the fragile state of mind beneath all the masculine armor of his role model brother (Ayhan Eranil), Yael (Finnigan Inan) finds himself next to his secret love Aaron (Fritz Rudolph), with whom he is comfortable, in the middle of the night. And the change begins with a small stroke of nail polish...

And dance...

Although popularized by Katy Perry's 2009 song of the same name, the phrase "Waking Up in Vegas" is used to mean people who go wild in Las Vegas casinos not remembering the next day, but thanks to the memories of our own childhood, we are sure that the two protagonists in this story will remember this moment.

The quality productions that queer cinema lacks come with such naive narratives, not with big-budget, big stories, and this is a really beautiful detail.

A boy at puberty. The older brother as model and, in good measure, not surprising, censor . His best friend, pretty eccentric , for good time cool for common passion for football but imposing questions, doubts, pretty reserves about him.

One of details - foot painted nails and the doubts about his sexual orientation . But all becomes pieces of exploration of himself and when the return home offers a presumed answer, the night at friend becomes fair gesture. Near a sort of initiation.

Not exactly a short film about homosexuality but gentle, precise, profound inspired portrait of puberty . And, not less, fascinating performances of two main actors.