Sylvia Robyn

Sylvia Robyn is an observational documentary I've been making for the last four years. It started as a portrait of Digenis, a 28 year old queer man, whom I got to know through some of his performances, only to find out very quickly that malgre les apparences was a lonely person, almost without friends and social contacts, who had lost his mother at a very young age, and who at 18 had moved away from the rest of his family in Edessa, to come to live alone in Athens, in the house his grandmother had given him. He had already been under psychiatric care for a few years for some periodic bouts of depression, one of which led him voluntarily to a stay in a psychiatric hospital. This was a decisive turning point in his life as soon afterwards a mental evaluation process began which resulted in his diagnosis as suffering from high-functioning autism, which explained many of the peculiarities of his character and behaviours and was largely the cause of the difficulty and frequent failure of his friend-ships and romantic relationships. At the same time he started taking hormones, openly confessing his desire for a transition to a more feminine body and a female identity and name. The desire had existed since childhood but its realization was constantly postponed. He simultaneously begins a bureaucratic process of changing his name. The original male name with the patronymic surname is progressively replaced with a first female name, Sylvia, then with the addition of a second, Robin, inspired by Robin Hood, and the plan is to eliminate the patronymic surname altogether and leave only the matronymic as a family name. Identification with the deceased mother is not something Sylvia hides.

Sylvia Robyn's transition does not have the hallmarks of a typical male to trans woman transition. She retains her beard and hair and the only visible changes are her breasts and the redistribution of fat in her body due to hormones. At this stage, she now describes herself as an 'that-trans', i.e. an autistic trans woman, a category to which, according to her, only she and one other person in Greece currently belong.

I have collected over a hundred hours of footage plus many of her own videos that, during the quaran-tine period when we couldn't film, she filmed herself and sent them to me the next morning. Also footage of her various performances. Sylvia Robyn is not a film about depression, autism, transgen-derism or any other thematic category, but a portrait of Digenes and then Sylvia and then Robyn, a person in a constant process of change and transformation, a person who in her own words "would like to stop time and finally enjoy a stability and a happiness" without running after her own transfor-mations and readjustments of herself, all this in the company of "a very special love that has been in her life for some time platonically and that she hopes this time has a happy ending".