TRANS CINEMA

A scholar honors the achievements and struggles of transgender artists.

Traditional media have rarely portrayed the transgender community in a positive light. Yet as Horak, an associate professor of film studies who runs the Transgender Media Lab at Carleton University, points out, there is “a vast and diverse catalog of trans media made by trans creators,” works that offer more nuanced and authentic depictions than had previously been seen. In this essential book, Horak uses “core methods of film studies—historical contextualization and aesthetic analysis” to examine films, videos, and web series by transgender artists, most of them from the U.S. and Canada, focusing primarily on creators who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Horak divides this volume into two sections. The first, “Foundations,” offers brief histories of transgender representation, where transgender people were invariably the butt of jokes, objects of suffering in films like Boys Don’t Cry and Dallas Buyers Club, or “psychokillers” as in The Silence of the Lambs. The second, “Key Themes,” celebrates works that address “the promises and the challenges of trans community and chosen family,” such as Wu Tsang’s Wildness, which “invites us to experience the joys and pains of striving for queer- and trans-of-color connectedness”; artists who “use cinema to rethink families of origin,” such as Canadian director Luis De Filippis, whose 13-minute For Nonna Anna (2017) “manages to convey a deep and compassionate familial relationship” between a Canadian transgender woman in her early 20s and her Italian grandmother; films such as Isabel Sandoval’s Shangri-La (2021) and Lingua Franca (2019), which focus on a transgender woman’s sexual desires; and transition documentaries, “probably the most numerous films about trans people.” This encouraging book is a fitting tribute to the artists who are raising awareness of the realities of transgender lives.

An important resource for highlighting transgender visibility.