In her latest feature documentary, No Money No Honey, filmmaker Nicole Costa explores the complexities of identity, vulnerability, and collective memory within the Latin American trans diaspora. Centred on three decades of personal VHS tape archives belonging to Máxima Mauricio, an Argentine migrant sex worker, the film examines the ways in which our relationships with our past can challenge our perceptions of who we are today.
We spoke to Nicole about the inspiration behind the film, her approach to shaping un-chronological footage, and the importance of finding authenticity and sisterhood in an increasingly disconnected world.
You uncovered three decades of VHS footage documenting Máxima Mauricio’s life. What was it like to encounter this archive, and when did you realise there was a film within it?
I first met Máxima while researching my previous documentary, The Journey of Monalisa (2019). When we needed additional footage from the 1990s to complete this film, Máxima invited me into a Brooklyn apartment filled with VHS tapes documenting decades of everyday life: friends, lovers, parties, performances, and intimate moments. I realized that beyond their historical value, these recordings offered a rare, deeply personal portrait of a community, told from within, through Máxima’s own gaze.
So, the film was already there, long before I arrived, embedded in those tapes. But of the countless stories they contained, my team and I chose to create an inward journey told from the outside, rooted by Máxima’s extraordinary resilience in confronting a past marked by violence.
The documentary follows Máxima across New York, Miami and Buenos Aires. How did those different places shape the story you wanted to tell?
These three cities represent different chapters of Máxima’s life, but also different emotional and political landscapes.
Buenos Aires represents Máxima’s origins, but also family breakdown, abuse, and painful memories, alongside friendships, the vibrant drag scene, and the discovery of new forms of belonging. Miami marks a period of searching, ambition, friendship and the emergence of a chosen family, while New York is where Máxima has built a life over the years, navigating work, relationships, and the challenges of growing older.
But we didn’t want the film to become a conventional story about migration from one place to another. We were more interested in how we carry these places within ourselves, how our identities are constantly shaped by the things we leave behind. There is also a larger story here about the Latin American trans diaspora, and how networks of friendship and solidarity become essential when traditional structures of protection and belonging are absent.
The film explores survival and sisterhood across many years. What did you learn about Máxima and the people around her through the process of making it?
When we began filming, in the middle of the pandemic, Máxima was profoundly isolated. With almost no clients, struggling with alcohol addiction and depression, she had withdrawn from much of the world around her. There was a deep sense of loneliness and disconnection, even a certain misanthropy.
But as the film unfolds, we witness Máxima gradually reconnecting with old friends, her chosen family, and the community that had sustained her for decades. Through these relationships, she begins to rediscover a sense of belonging and a purpose beyond her own survival, slowly finding her way out of isolation.
What moved me most was realizing that sisterhood is not simply an ideal; it is something practiced through care, solidarity, conflict, forgiveness, and the decision to show up for one another. And despite the violence and hardship that run through their histories, Máxima and the people around her remain funny, irreverent, contradictory, vulnerable, and extraordinarily alive.
How did you approach shaping footage recorded over such a long period into a cohesive documentary?
The editing process was one of the most challenging and exciting aspects of making the film. We were working with two very different kinds of material: Máxima’s personal VHS recordings, filmed over many years, and the contemporary footage we shot together.
From the very beginning, I envisioned the film as a journey into the past through Máxima’s tapes, in which she would revisit her own memories, both dark and luminous, to make sense of her present and imagine a future alongside her community. With this idea as our guiding thread, I worked closely with editor Melisa Miranda, who has a particularly sharp sensitivity to the materiality and textures of images, and producer Daniela Camino to develop the film’s fragmented structure. We never intended to tell the story chronologically. Instead, we wanted the archive and the present to enter into dialogue, allowing memories, emotions, and unexpected connections to shape the narrative.
Another important element was money, which became a recurring thread throughout the film. Money is connected to survival, migration, sex work, independence, and the possibility of making choices. It is both a practical necessity and a powerful political question. The challenge was to create a cinematic language without losing the freedom and authenticity of the original material.
The film is described as raw and luminous. How did you balance the difficult realities in Máxima’s story with the warmth and connection that emerge from the archive?
I never wanted to make a film that reduced Máxima’s life to a narrative of suffering or victimhood. Of course, the film addresses difficult realities: economic precarity, abuse, illness, loss, and the vulnerability experienced by many trans migrants and sex workers. But these experiences coexist with humor, pleasure, friendship, glamour and desire, and extraordinary moments of beauty.
In a way, the archive itself helped us find that balance. Máxima’s camera was often drawn toward joy, intimacy, celebration, and the people who made life meaningful. I believe there is something political about allowing marginalized people to exist on screen in all their complexity, without constantly asking them to explain or justify their existence. Throughout the process, we approached our work with care, respect, and a strong sense of ethical responsibility. Building trust and maintaining an ongoing dialogue with Máxima were essential to honoring the intimacy of her life and memories.
Was there a moment in the footage that surprised you or changed your understanding of Máxima’s journey?
Personally, what surprised me most wasn’t necessarily one dramatic event, but the experience of watching Máxima encounter these images again, sometimes decades after they had been recorded.
There is something very moving about seeing someone look at a younger version of themselves, recognizing people who are no longer present, remembering relationships, and sometimes discovering new meanings in moments that once seemed ordinary.
I was particularly struck by how the archive gradually became a space for reflection and reconciliation. These tapes were living objects, capable of producing new emotions and conversations in the present. It made me think about how we construct our own memories, and how the act of looking back can transform our understanding of who we are today. In that sense, the film became not only a portrait of Máxima’s life, but also a film about the act of remembering.
What do you hope audiences take away from No Money No Honey, particularly those who may be encountering Máxima’s story for the first time?
I hope audiences encounter Máxima first and foremost as a human being, rather than through the labels that society so often imposes on people.
Máxima’s story is deeply personal, but it also speaks to larger questions about migration, economic survival, identity, aging, friendship, and the right to determine how we live our lives.
I would love for audiences to recognize the enormous historical and emotional value of these personal archives. So much of queer and trans history has been ignored, erased, or told from the outside. Here, we have the privilege of seeing part of that history through the eyes of someone who lived it. I also hope people leave the cinema feeling connected to Máxima and to the extraordinary people who have been part of her life.
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