LONDON (2026) Marcio Picoli, Victor di Marco

Seen in Venice 83.

Queer Lion 2026 Winner.

London is a young Brazilian boy, bisexual, disabled, and quite poor.

These prerogatives would already scare away most of us, cum fetishists, tired of watching films about hardship and poverty porn. Not to mention gender; even those who invented the woke movement have disavowed it. But the two directors ignore that and tell a story far removed from bombastic, high-flown, committed screenplays, sometimes bordering on pietism, but always very sober.

London is disabled and at a certain point in the film he even tells us what his handicap consists of: his brain is unable to produce dopamine, so his muscles do more or less what they want, without him being able to control them.

Her occupation is sex worker , even if she doesn't practice it in a canonical way: she works in a fetish club, where her disability is an advantage.

He wraps people in film and then uses his prosthesis in a, let's say, erotic way.

His colleagues are:

• A dominatrix lesbian hunchback girl.

• A guy whose condition is not understood, especially because his diagnosis is changed every year.

The film is all about London, played by an extraordinary Victor di Marco, who, in addition to directing the film, is also its impeccable protagonist. He also has the same disability in real life. He lays bare his doubts, his fragility, and his desire to be invisible, because for him, being looked at means being mocked or pitied.

He hates his body but at the same time he knows he can't have anything else but that, aware that it will always be the first characteristic that people will see in him. Splendid in this regard is the joke of his hunchbacked dominatrix friend who, after yet another hole in a first meeting, declares:

Maybe she didn't like my hair

Her sexual conquests are shown, from a very good-looking boy caught in a chat room to an older lady who also becomes a sort of lover.

The dialogues between them are memorable.