All God’s Colours: Documentary on faith, drag and community

My reading of All God’s Colours is that the documentary examines inclusivity as a practical distribution of power. Enghave Church does more than declare that everyone is welcome. The church holds services for the Danish HIV community and organises Children’s Pride for rainbow families. These are not just symbols. They are choices about programming, audience and public identity. A community changes when people outside the traditional core are allowed to decide what happens within it.

That is also why resistance becomes part of the film’s fabric. The Children’s Pride service has been criticised by conservative Christians and right-wing political voices. Among the actors mentioned in connection with the confrontations are Dansk Regnbueråd, Rasmus Paludan and Rasmus Munch Søndergård. The film follows the church through a year in which such conflicts are not abstract culture-war theatre, but something that lands in a specific place with a specific calendar.

That matters far beyond Enghave. A value can survive for a long time as a neat phrase. It becomes far more vulnerable once it has an altar, a children’s service and people who no longer want to settle for being tolerated guests. The church makes belonging visible, and visibility is rarely free. It invites both recognition and the opposite: the feeling, among others, that a space has been taken from them. That last point is not necessarily an argument against the church. It is a description of how community always involves space and priorities.

Bo, the film’s church caretaker, appears both under his legal name and as the drag persona Ramona Macho. According to the film’s account, he speaks about growing up with the feminine side of himself and his interest in singing and dancing needing to be kept in check. In one scene, he says his father reacted dismissively when Bo, at the age of ten, performed in a Hawaiian skirt.

The Hawaiian costume is almost comical in its innocence. That is precisely why it becomes such a sharp detail. A child performs a dance number, and an adult reads it as something that must be stopped. Here lies one of the documentary’s most precise conflicts: Who decides when play becomes wrong, and who is allowed to perform without first having to explain themselves?

In that context, Ramona Macho can be read as a public space for what was once held back. But the persona is not magic dust that dissolves every old wound. The film shows Bo moving between different ways of being visible. His mother, Gurli, is described as proud and fascinated by his ability to move between the two personas. It can be read as an image of free self-creation. It can also contain a certain unease: Is the shift an expression of freedom, or a social technique learned because the world still cannot hold the whole self at once?

The film follows Ramona to a performance at Bøssehuset in Christiania and to communal singing during Pride at City Hall Square. These places show that belonging does not only arise in the institution that opens the door. It is also created through scenes, rituals and repetition. Singing together is a small but demanding form of collectivity. You have to blend your voice with others and accept that the community does not sound exactly the same.

A fair counterargument is that Enghave Church is a special place. The documentary therefore cannot be used as proof that Danish church life in general has become inclusive. On the contrary, a priest in the film says that among young confirmation boys he experiences growing scepticism towards queer environments, pointing to an uneven development.

All God’s Colours does not offer a simple recipe for acceptance. It shows something more difficult: A community only truly includes when it accepts that its sound, its rituals and its idea of who naturally belongs will be changed. The crucial question is therefore not whether the door is open. It is who is still expected to leave part of themselves behind before they walk through it.