28-year old transvestite Ale lives in a small slum of Buenos Aires, surviving by collecting and recycling trash from the streets. One day, Ale comes across a personal diary of a woman who has since committed suicide. Reading about her husband and her ten-year old daughter, Ale begins to realize her desire for her own family. <Mia> is a heart-warming drama about the lives and struggles of sexual minorities and the issues they are confronted with. The director and his loving gaze transforms this community occupied only by people of ‘different’ sexual orientation into a fantastical new world, based on a real place that once existed until 1995. Juxtaposing two very different ‘homes’ ? Ale's "Pink Village", a forsaken community designated for social outcasts; and Mia's ordinary middle- class household ? the film masterfully renders the differences and similaries between what is considered "normal" and what is not. As Ale’s hopes and dreams in the form of her own maternal instincts surface, her own issues surrounding abandonment by her family and the "impossibility" of her dream is brought to heart-wrenching light. (RHEE, Soue-won)