Nico

I was three when I first began to feel it. The gap between myself and “normalcy.” That tiny crevice of experience we are asked to slip into began to walk behind me like a distended shadow. My queerness, my gender nonconformity, and the concerned conversations I overheard were like water seeping into a basement determined to remain dry. This feeling of dysphoria, of otherness, of being left out of a joke that everyone around me seemed to understand so easily, has followed me all my life. And in the face of it my deepest, most authentic self became something to hide. It alienated me, separating me from this supposed basic tent pole of human experience. There was something inside of me that I felt no one could understand, that even I didn’t understand. For me and other gender variant people, the reminders of our difference pop up every moment, a pernicious and ever-present hum that is everywhere, all around us, all the time, but, try as we might, it is like we can’t find the right pitch.

We are all by now familiar with the story of transition, the story of hiding, the story of taking the leap, but we have yet to see a film exploring the particularly fraught experience of what happens after transition, after the leap into the unknown is taken. That is what this story about: The space after the choice. About how, for some people, after choosing to step closer to their authentic self, living in the world can become even more difficult, as although they have changed, the world around them hasn’t. The weight of the binary can be even more isolating and claustrophobic. Every little interaction with friends, the clerk at the bank or an anonymous neighbor can be loaded with the weight of being perceived in a gendered way. This is a story about a person who has walked through the door of transition and found themselves in a strange, liminal hallway alone. This is a story about finding what awaits them on the other side.

This film will not be comfortable for everyone. It’s not supposed to be. It will bring the audience into the internal landscape of someone struggling with something that many people never give a second thought; the alienation and, in turn, the beauty of not fitting into a gendered box. I want them to walk away questioning how they perceive others and how they themselves want to be perceived. But more than this, I want those who have experienced anything like this to leave with a feeling of transcendence and connectedness, knowing they are less alone. How could any binary possibly hold even a fraction of the beauty of a human soul?