While planning a birthday party for her late aunt Bianca “Exotica” Maldonado, María José Maldonado revisits the past in order to celebrate and correct Bianca’s legacy as a transgender woman.

We follow María José in taking the first steps in fulfilling her promise to Bianca through understanding her childhood as told by Bianca’s mother, Gloria Voelcker, revisiting the fun of New York City in the '90s as well as the formidable moments with Bianca’s best friend, Nana Nazario, and creating meaning and connection through spiritual practice with Bianca’s niece, Andromeda Rodriguez. Marrying those moments with María José’s fond childhood memories of spending time with Bianca, we experience a visual and auditory tribute to both Bianca herself and their relationship.

The film culminates at Bianca’s 57th birthday party and reinforces the copious but, at times, contemptuous love that Bianca—and many trans people today—receive from friends and family.

https://filmfreeway.com/MYFIERCEAUNTBIANCA_MJM

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María José Maldonado, Co-Director

María José Maldonado (she/they/fairy) is a genderqueer Salvadorian-Ecuadorian filmmaker, writer and artist born and raised in Queens, NY. María José’s films celebrate the fabulous Latine queer and trans people in her life and the love between them. María José is a BRIC Documentary Intensive Film Lab 2022 alum, Toronto Queer Film Festival DIY Film Lab alum 2020-2021 where they wrote, directed & produced their first docushort “CALL 1-800-SALVI” about searching for queer Salvadoran friends in Toronto, the lead in award-winning Canadian short “Saturday Fuego Diablo” (Dir. Anita Abbasi, 2022), Lambda Literary Speculative Fiction Fellow 2022, Sandra Cisneros’s Macondo Writers Workshop Fiction Fellow 2021, Leslie-Lohman Artist Fellow 2020, Barbara Deming Fund 2020 grantee for feminist fiction & a Queer|Art Mentorship Literature Fellow 2019 mentored by Charles Rice-González. In 2023, she was a Visual AIDS Research Fellow, where she archived her aunt Bianca's cultural and artistic contributions and wrote a piece about Bianca published by Visual AIDS in March 2024. Full-time artist since 2019. Since then, María José’s been cobbling together her own DIY art school education through film labs, artist fellowships & film classes. They're a graduate of Howard University (JD/MBA), Dartmouth College, Phillips Exeter Academy, Prep for Prep and PS64Q.

María José lives in Queens, NY with her baby Izalco, husband Alejandro and cat Vinny.

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Latavia Alicia Young, Co-Director

Across all genres and mediums, Latavia Young gravitates toward uncharted stories that center truth. Coming of age, Blackness, queerness, love, class, and the cultural aesthetics of history and dreams tend to be at the center of her creative explorations. With a history of bringing thought-provoking and visually elevated work to fruition, Latavia's recent projects include THE BURDEN OF CONTEXT, a biographical short documentary following Latavia as she investigates and preserves the milieu and memory of her ancestors, MY FIERCE AUNT BIANCA, a short documentary co-directed and produced by herself and Maria José Maldonaldo centering the life and legacy of the trans-starlette featured on the cover of Blood Orange’s Coastal Grooves Album, and GRACE, a narrative short written and directed by Natalie Jasmine Harris illuminating the intersection of girlhood, Blackness, and queerness in the 1950's U.S. South which premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. She has held positions across film and television development and production at The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon, RadicalMedia, AT WILL MEDIA, and Imagine Entertainment subsidiary Jax Media.