Voguing—which mimics the poses of models from the renowned American fashion magazine Vogue—is much more than a dance style: it’s also a form of resistance against exclusion for LGBTQI+ communities. Created in the 1970s in New York by the Afro-Latinx and gay, trans community, the ballroom scene is now making its debut in La Réunion, an island where issues of homosexuality and gender are still taboo in most families.

Anouk Burel is a journalist and director. After 10 years as a Senior Reporter for Envoyé spécial (France 2), during which she produced over 40 reports, she decided to focus on documentary filmmaking. Le monde est un théâtre, produced by Babel Doc, is her second film following Les Combattantes, broadcast on France 3 as part of the Femmes en jaunedocumentary series (2019). Before becoming a journalist, Anouk studied theater and philosophy in Strasbourg. She covered news for 5 years for France 2’s news programs before joining the Envoyé spécial team with Guilaine Chenu and Françoise Joly in 2007. She has made numerous documentaries about marginalized individuals in France and abroad. She won the Ilaria Alpi Prize for Best International Report in 2010 for Les Glaneurs de Nairobi (an immersion in a Kenyan dump), was nominated for the FIGRA in 2018 for Les Étoiles de Kibera (the story of a ballet class in the largest slum in East Africa), and was a finalist for the Albert Londres Prize in 2018 for Le Médecin des oubliés, a portrait of a general practitioner in Roubaix. She also created a series of interviews with international photojournalists, Chambre noire, broadcast in 10 episodes on Envoyé spécial (2017-2018).