After the venue closed, the community found a new place in Echo Park: Club Bahia, where Stud Country has found a home and a dance floor. Drawn to the venue’s vintage glamour and unique aesthetic, Abascal decided to give up writing and embark on the journey to make her first film. “Club Bahia is a really beautiful and unique place: It’s a mid-century Latin dance club with old neon lights and murals,” she explains. “I just thought, ‘This is a story that should be represented visually.'”

While looking for a creative partner, a friend put her in touch with Kern, a documentary filmmaker. The two got to work because they shared a mutual passion for culture and a concern about the gentrification that is displacing LA’s communities. “The main question for me from the beginning was, ‘Why are places like Oil Can Harry’s closing?’ When Lina and I went to the event together, we learned that Club Bahia was also about to close,” Kern explains. “A central focus of the film for us is the importance of preserving places that foster community, culture and art.”

The result of their collaboration is an immersive project that harnesses the appeal of line dancing by showing busy footage of the hoots and hollers from Club Bahia, paired with intimate interviews with dancers of varying ages and life experiences, exploring their connection to the scene and the history of queer line dancing. “I’m a documentary filmmaker, so a lot of my projects make the audience feel like they’re part of the environment, like a fly on the wall,” Kern explains. “In ‘Stud Country,’ we wanted to make the audience feel like they were on the dance floor too.”