Every Queer Cinephile Should Know Ruth Caudeli

These are queer films in every sense, in conversation with each other and our world.

Oct 02, 2025

Since I first started working as a critic in 2018, queer Colombian auteur Ruth Caudeli has been a film festival staple. She returns to NewFest this year with Same, Again (2025), her fourth feature to play at the festival and her twentieth credit in the last eight years. “Work. And don’t stop working,” she said in a recent interview when asked for career advice. This approach has resulted in an ever-growing filmography that has pushed the boundaries of queer storytelling — in narrative and form.

Her debut feature Eva + Candela (2018) tracks the desolation of a queer relationship. Like Blue Valentine for bisexual women, the film layers its breakup story with a love story. We’re shown the initial spark and genuine care between the titular leads and it makes the fractures so much worse. In some ways this is Caudeli’s most conventional film, but it already holds her keen visual eye, her depth of emotion, and her ability to garner excellent performances including from frequent collaborator Silvia Santamaria.

Caudeli reteamed with Santamaria for Second Star on the Right (2019), a 30-something coming-of-age movie heavy with queer shame and bursting with queer creativity. Santamaria plays Emilia, a struggling actress/teacher and the token bisexual in a friend group of straight women. Those closest to Emilia don’t understand her sexuality, misidentifying her as a lesbian, and she does the best she can to keep her lives separate by not introducing them to her girlfriend. The film remains grounded in Emilia’s emotions — and Santamaria’s performance — while being unafraid of taking big formal swings. At times, Caudeli lets the stunning black and white photography shift to color or has a musical sequence or, in one instance, includes a montage of cell phone footage. Even as its main character stumbles in her queer identity and maturity, the film itself is clear in its queer aesthetic and fully developed in its formal confidence.

Her next feature, Leading Ladies (2021), was her first full-length foray into improvisation. While precisely structured and still benefiting from Caudeli’s eye, this film feels looser than her previous work. Her love of actresses, evident in all these movies, is at the center here as the five leads own the film with minimal distractions. Centered around a dinner party reunion where secrets are revealed, the film feels like a murder mystery where the violence is all emotional. It’s a riveting experiment that doesn’t feel the need to overexplain — instead it trusts its performers and its audience.

Still from Caudeli’s *Leading Ladies.* Read Drew Burnett Gregory’s 2021 review.

All of Caudeli’s films feel personal but her fourth film, Petit Mal (2022), is the most explicitly autobiographical. It co-stars the director herself and opens with a title card that reads: This movie is our real fiction. Following the relationship between Caudeli, Santamaria, and other frequent collaborator Ana María Otálora, the film is at once normalizing and specific in its portrayal of their throuple. Like Second Star on the Right, it shifts between black and white photography and color, each of its five chapters full of stylistic flourishes. It’s also about the experiences of being a filmmaker and an actor, questioning what kinds of queer stories get made and the ways our lives are most often filtered through fiction.

If you watch Same, Again (2025) without having seen this prior work, you’ll still find a rich drama of intersecting stories about various types of abuse women face in the theatre world and beyond. But there’s an added depth when the film is placed in conversation with Caudeli’s filmography as a whole. The improvisation, the focus on actresses, the blurred lines between fact and fiction, the loose yet deliberate camerawork, the formal experimentation — this isn’t just a great movie, it’s a great Ruth Caudeli movie. Given how limited film industries all over the world have been for queer women, Caudeli’s prolific career makes her unique. Very few queer women have been able to make this many features across decades, let alone in less than one. And while her advice may have been to work, she’s not just taking jobs. Each of these films feels like an uncompromising vision, a pure expression from Caudeli and her collaborators. Perhaps the projects are limited by resources, but they are totally unencumbered by the societal pressures they often explore. These are queer films in every sense, in conversation with each other and our world.