Power­paola

“Virus Tropical – screening & talk”

Powerpaola in conversation with Lea Hübner

The event takes place on December 7, at  ACUD Kino Berlin.

Adapted from the graphic novel memoir by Colombian-Ecuadorian cartoonist Powerpaola, Virus Tropical is a thoughtful and deeply affecting coming-of-age story that begins on the night Paola is conceived – in a stylized but anatomically complete sequence that sets the tone for the film’s matter-of-fact exploration of sexuality and family – and ends with her striking out on her own as a young adult. Over the intervening years we accompany Paola, the youngest of three daughters raised by a mostly single mom, as she gropes and fumbles her way through friendships, new schools, clunky romances, and various domestic dramas. Scrappy DIY black and white animation and lo-fi Latin-indie score lend a lovingly idiosyncratic charm to a film that brings forth a unique and utterly refreshing girl’s POV perspective. By the end you have formed a gentle intimacy with this family and are happy to have spent time together.

Powerpaola was born in Quito (Ecuador) in 1977 and moved to Colombia with her family at the age of 13. She studied at the Fundación Universitaria de Bellas Artes in Medellín, where she founded the art collective Taller 7. After extended stays in Paris, Sydney, San Salvador and Paris, among other places, she currently lives in Buenos Aires.  At the age of 27, she began drawing comics, which first appeared on Flickr; in 2011, the Argentinian publisher Editorial Comun published her autobiographical comic Virus Tropical. The comic was enthusiastically reviewed, translated into French, Italian and Brazilian and made into a film in 2017 (the film was shown at the Berlinale in 2018, among others). The German translation by Lea Hübner was published by Parallelallee in 2022.

Lea Hübner was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1973. She studied Latin American Studies as well as Spanish and Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. Before and during her university education she lived, studied and worked in Brazil and Spain for about two years. She is a freelance translator for Spanish and Portuguese of a  wide range of texts, such as literature, documents, essays, exhibition catalogues, children´s books and poetry, but with a main focus on comics by latin american authors, bringing Marcelo D’Salete, Marcello Quintanilha, Powerpaola, Sol Díaz, Angélica Freitas and Sole Otero to a german-speaking readership. Lea Hübner also works in a comic-bookshop, curates and interprets panel discussions with artists and has been working as a teacher for literary translation at several universities, currently at Lateinamerika-Institut at Freie Universität Berlin.

On Thursday, December 7, Powerpaola will talk with Lea Hübner about her comic Virus Tropical, family, identity and her time in Berlin. Get your tickets here.