Before traveling to Kiev, Ukraine in late October to attend the Molodist International Film Festival with my documentary Mala Mala, which focuses on transgender cultures in Puerto Rico and their fight for civil rights, several close friends and family members pleaded with me not to go. "So, you have a death wish?" a friend asked me. "You know, there's a war over there," another said.

Going into Dan Sickles and Antonio Santini's debut feature Mala Mala, I wondered if I was about to watch 2014's answer to Jennie Livingston's controversial classic Paris Is Burning.