Imagine that every day of your life is a bad hair day. You’re a nine-year-old dreamer, living in the hostile city of Caracas with your recently widowed mother and baby brother. You’re poor, rejected, and decidedly “different” from the other kids. Add a possible identity crisis into the mix, and you’re beginning to understand what it means to be Junior, the star of Mariana Rondón’s award-winning Pelo Malo (“Bad Hair”), now playing at Vancouver’s Queer Film Festival.

The plot is simple: a new school year is around the corner and Junior must decide how he wants to take his class head shot. Will he don the socially respectable button-down and trousers, or the flashy, straight-haired singers’ getup he dearly longs for? Making things harder, Junior’s singer fantasy is complicated by his impossibly curly mop of “pelo malo” that won’t lie flat no matter what he does, his family’s inability to pay for the photo shoot, and most importantly, his mother’s insistence that Junior start acting more like one of the other boys.

Torn between winning his mother’s love and honouring his own sense of self, our young hero’s choice becomes the audience’s own. Forced to examine our own lives under the lens, we wonder what our head shots say about us. What costumes have we put on? What roles are we playing? And what have we given up to become who we are? Prompting questions of identity and gender, love and suffering, survival and responsibility, one little boy’s snapshot thus becomes a tool for seeing the bigger picture.

Missed the showing? Pelo Malo will be playing again at The Vancouver Latin American Film Festival on August 29 (7 pm) and September 7 (3 pm) at The Cinemateque.

Click here to check out the other films playing at this year’s Queer Film Festival.