autofiction • moving image
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.

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





