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Vanilla Underground: REDUX

Experimental film

2023 - 3’10” | Digital | B&W + Color | Sound

UK/Spain - 16mm footage shot in the United Kingdom (2021)

*Work available under request: pedroborbamendes@gmail.com

Excerpt from "Vanilla Underground: REDUX" (2023)

This work re-engages with 16mm footage shot in 2021 — repurposed here through a collage strategy that merges it with educational and journalistic clips from mid-20th-century media, reflecting my ongoing exploration of archival material as a site for rewriting personal and collective narratives.In this assemblage, the archival imagery operates as the protagonist’s unconscious: a visual space where cultural codes of masculinity, religiosity, and queerness resurface and clash.

Through free association and affective dissonance, the film offers glimpses into a psyche fractured by repression and desire. Here, queerness is not bound by time but emerges as a continuum — shaped by decades of homoerotic aesthetics embedded in public imagery. These fragments haunt and inform the protagonist’s inner world, revealing the way bodies and identities are both disciplined and undone by visual culture.

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story
screenplay                                 
cast                                              
director
assistant director                                       
producer 
production designer                                         cinematography                  

1st assistant camera 

2nd assistant camera

gaffer

sound mixer

composer

covid supervisor

make-up & hair

editor                                       
colorist       
                           

graphic designer

Amand Gatti, Pedro Mendes
Pedro Mendes    
Benedict Esdale, David Torozoff        
Pedro Mendes                                       
Zhiru Xie                              
Zhiru Xie             

Pierluigi Campa
Doddi El-Gabry          

Oliver Staton

Weiheng Chen

Pierluigi Campa

Edouard Keller

Nacho Mañámesas

Tom Rowe

Liine Kiintok

Pedro  Mendes
Pedro Mendes                                 

Tiago Gasperin

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