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This special limited edition slipcover (designed by Adam Maida) is limited to 1,500 units and is only available on our website and at select indie retailers. Absolutely no major retailers will be stocking them.
Bizarro is dedicated to unearthing the boldest, most original visions in Spanish cinema—films that are as daring, provocative, and offbeat as they are artistically distinctive. Whether restoring lost cult treasures or bringing overlooked gems to new audiences, Bizarro offers a curated selection for cinephiles craving the unexpected. In Spanish, “Bizarro” means both strange and brave, a name that reflects our commitment to cinema at its most unconventional. Proudly partnering with OCN Distribution, we invite viewers to discover the fearless and extraordinary from Spain’s cinematic underground—restored and celebrated for a new generation.
In the claustrophobic final days of Franco's Spain, María José (Victoria Abril), a teenage trans girl, has always known who she is—even as her brutish father and a society built on dictatorship-era moral codes refuse to see it. Sent from her provincial home to the neon-stained cabarets of Barcelona as a punishment, she instead finds a clandestine freedom there: a community of trans women, drag performers, and outcasts orbiting the magnetic Bibí (Bibiana Fernández), whose mere existence is a quiet detonation. As María José steps into her own name and her own body, she must navigate predatory men, uncertain love, and the slow, defiant emergence of a self that four decades of dictatorship had tried to erase from the realm of the possible.
Made by acclaimed auteur Vicente Aranda (The Blood Splattered Bride) when Francoist censorship was crumbling, and just months before it was formally abolished, Change of Sex (Cambio de sexo, 1977) is a landmark of trans representation in Spanish cinema—arriving the same year a Spanish court legally recognized a trans woman as female for the first time, as the country began to imagine lives it had spent forty years denying. The film features luminous, career-launching performances from future Almodóvar regulars Victoria Abril (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, High Heels) and Bibiana Fernández (Kika, Law of Desire), whose presence here marks the prologue to a queer cinematic explosion to come. Shot with a radiant naturalism by Oscar-winning cinematographer Néstor Almendros (Days of Heaven) in his only Spanish feature, and never before available on disc in North America, this restored, fully uncut high-definition presentation brings one of Aranda's most quietly radical works to Blu-ray for the very first time. Essential viewing for admirers of transgressive cinema, trans film history, and the rebellious culture of the Transition.
directed by: Vicente Aranda
starring: Victoria Abril, Fernando Sancho, Bibiana Fernández, María Elías, Rafaela Aparicio, Lou Castel, Daniel Martín, Montserrat Carulla
1977 / 113 min / 1.66:1 / Spanish DTS-HD MA 1.0
Additional info:
Overall rating: 4.0 / 5 from 1 reviews.
Review topics: [].
"The melodrama around surgery and the familiar linear “transition narrative” can get pretty heavy-handed, but as a snapshot of what trans womanhood was being forced to navigate in 1970s Spain, it’s genuinely illuminating. There’s something strangely moving about watching María José fight for a life that the world keeps telling her she has to justify. And that final image."
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