The Last Speech
This video reimagines the final scene of The Great Dictator (1940) by Charlie Chaplin through a queer lens. Chaplin’s first full sound film becomes, here, a site of transformation: the actor employs lip-sync—a performative practice rooted in drag culture—to inhabit and reinterpret his iconic speech. The characters non-binary identities introduce a layered reconfiguration of gender, voice, and representation that challenges the film’s original boundaries.
Set against Italian architecture and landscapes, the work evokes the lingering imprint of fascist foundations, drawing unsettling parallels with contemporary political rhetoric and policy. Within this context, the presence of queer performers foreground the ongoing precarity faced by trans and queer communities, whose identities remain contested and politicized.
In doing so, the piece interrogates who is permitted to embody power—and how that power is performed, reimagined, re-distributed and potentially reclaimed in the face of systems that continue to marginalize queer and trans lives.
