The Debutante

When we first encountered the work of Leonora Carrington it felt like discovering the gateway to a secret universe that we always suspected must exist. Funny, surreal, grotesque and mystical, her art encapsulates everything we strive for in our films. We read her short story ‘The Debutante’ and knew we had to adapt it. In just three short pages it captures something so rare. It’s relentlessly original, deeply personal, hilarious and macabre, all while subtly exploring gender through the eyes of a child.

The story isn’t overtly queer, but it wasn’t a stretch to find trans themes there – the Debutante is experiencing a form of dysphoria at the prospect of her impending ladyhood. For us this is a story about femininity and genderqueerness and this was at the forefront of our minds when we assembled a production team. Many of our major production roles were filled by queer and trans people, including our DP, our editor, and ourselves. Our set was majority female, majority queer and included an entirely trans and nonbinary camera crew.

Within the film itself we decided to underline the genderqueer themes through casting. Kelly McCormack, our wonderfully androgynous lead, seems totally out of place and trapped in her mother’s world of hyper-femininity. And in a bit of cross-gender casting inspired by Divine in the films of John Waters, we cast a drag queen (Paul Soileau aka Christeene) as the Mother. This helped emphasize the absurdity of that character’s violent enforcement of femininity. Plus, Paul’s amazing.

The Hyena is played by a woman in a B-horror movie-esque costume (the incredible Jasmine Albuquerque), further blurring the line between the feral and the feminine. The Hyena goes on her own gender-journey in the film, experimenting and finding gender-euphoria in a new high-femme identity. In our research we were delighted to discover just how appropriate this was – turns out hyenas are among the most gender-fucky animals on earth, living in matriarchal power structures where the females are all endowed with so-called pseudo penises. Look it up, it’s amazing.

For visual inspiration we drew from the world of Italian horror films, Argento’s Deep Red especially. Bringing in the horror element made everything click. For the Debutante, the idea of being forced into a ballgown is tantamount to torture. Ultimately, this is what the film is really about – the violence of coercing a child into a gender performance that is abhorrent to their soul. In our story the Mother’s violence only begets more violence, as the Debutante conspires to murder a maid in her plan to escape compulsory ladyhood. As queer filmmakers we relished the opportunity to tell a story about a complex genderqueer character. It’s not another straightforward story about a sad trans teen. It’s crooked. Is the Debutante a hero or a villain? Victim or victimizer? All of the above? The story’s morality isn’t black and white – it lives in the grey and murky middle where the thorniest questions reside, and where you may just be swallowed alive by a blood-thirsty Hyena.