by Hudson Moura
Directed by Guga Paes and Cainã Souza, the short documentary D’un autre monde: Moh Dafok introduces us to Moh Dafok, a Brazilian drag queen who has transformed Montréal into both a new home and an enormous stage for her extravagant personality. Colourful, provocative, funny, and determined never to go unnoticed, Moh Dafok is an immediately charismatic presence. The film captures that energy remarkably well. At the same time, it creates an intriguing contradiction: while promising to discover who Moh Dafok really is when the curtain falls, it ultimately remains fascinated by the character without fully revealing the person behind her.
The film announces this question immediately. A gentle female voice-over introduces Moh Dafok as a “divine, funny, untamed” Brazilian star shining in Montréal and asks who she really is when the performance ends. The narration even presents the film as the portrait of a “living legend.” These words establish an expectation that Paes and Souza will gradually move beyond the public persona and uncover something about the individual who created it.
Curiously, that is precisely what D’un autre monde resists doing. We learn about Moh Dafok’s arrival in Montréal from São Paulo and about the importance of migration to the construction of her identity, but some of the most basic biographical information remains absent. She applies her makeup in front of the camera, but the film does not really take us to the other side of the transformation. Moh Dafok remains Moh Dafok.
A Brazilian Drag Queen Finds Herself in Montréal
This withholding is particularly interesting because migration appears to be fundamental to the story. Montréal is not simply the city where Moh Dafok now happens to live. The film suggests that moving there allowed this personality to flourish and offered her a space in which she could position herself both as an individual and as an immigrant.
Yet her Brazilian identity remains extremely strong. Even speaking French and English and inhabiting Montréal with apparent confidence, Moh Dafok repeatedly presents herself through her Brazilianness. There is consequently something compelling in the way the film portrays immigration not as the replacement of one identity by another, but as the discovery of a new environment in which an existing identity can become more visible, exaggerated, and performative.
The city participates actively in that process. Moh Dafok appears in different extravagant costumes around Montréal, occupying streets, subway and public spaces with her body and personality. The images are often beautiful and intensely colourful, visually matching the excess of the character herself. Rather than simply being photographed against Montréal, she seems to inhabit and perform the city, temporarily transforming its spaces into extensions of her own stage.
A Documentary That Behaves Like Its Subject
Formally, Paes and Souza avoid making a conventional talking-head documentary. D’un autre monde mixes interviews, observational footage, street performances, animation, voice-over, and comic interludes. The animations are especially colourful and well integrated into the exuberant universe the filmmakers construct around their subject.
The result is extremely dynamic. The short duration passes quickly, helped enormously by Moh Dafok’s charisma. At times, however, the film feels less like a continuous essay film or documentary portrait than a collection of comic sketches or anecdotes, almost like a succession of short videos made for social media. Whenever the film appears ready to become serious, something humorous interrupts the mood.
That structure certainly suits Moh Dafok. Provocation, exaggeration, and absurdity are central to the persona, and the filmmakers understand that a restrained documentary style would probably diminish precisely what makes their subject so compelling. Even an activity such as bungee jumping becomes another opportunity for performance, with Moh Dafok determined to confront the experience without abandoning the extravagant costume. Risk itself becomes part of the spectacle.
There is an appealing correspondence here between subject and form. The film is restless because Moh Dafok is restless; it is colourful because she is colourful; it refuses solemnity because she continually converts situations into comedy.
The Character—and the Person We Do Not Meet
But this successful identification between the film and its subject also produces its principal limitation. The documentary is so enchanted by Moh Dafok the character that it does not sufficiently investigate the person who created her.
Drag necessarily involves transformation, exaggeration, performance, and the deliberate construction of another identity. The enormous wigs, elaborate makeup, extravagant clothing, and provocative behaviour are not obstacles to discovering Moh Dafok—they are part of what makes her interesting. Yet once the film itself asks who exists when the curtain comes down, the absence of that other person becomes increasingly noticeable.
Who created Moh Dafok? Where did the name come from? What separates the performer from the character? What did immigration change in the person beyond allowing the drag persona to flourish? The film raises the possibility of these questions without going deeply enough into them.
That does not make D’un autre monde unsuccessful. In fact, its production is remarkably accomplished. The cinematography is polished, the sound and editing sustain an energetic rhythm, the animation complements the personality of the protagonist, and Montréal is captured with considerable visual vitality. Paes and Souza have also found in Moh Dafok an extraordinarily cinematic subject: someone whose physical presence, humour, costumes, and willingness to push boundaries naturally command the camera.
What the short ultimately creates, however, is more of an invitation than a complete portrait. By the time it ends, I wanted to know considerably more—not simply about Moh Dafok, whom the film presents so vividly, but about the person who becomes Moh Dafok.
Perhaps that curiosity is partly the film’s achievement. D’un autre monde: Moh Dafok successfully makes its protagonist difficult to forget. But having promised to look behind the curtain, it leaves the curtain largely in place. The film gives us the splendour of the performance; what remains tantalizingly out of reach is the life that makes that performance possible.
Explore the festival’s complete programme at Brazil Film Fest 2026
Rating: 4/5