Category: Queer East

Xiaodi is a documentary about a Chinese trans teenage girl’s multiple escape attempts from conversion therapy.

Xiaodi herself is so impressive. She has a dead-centre strength, a ‘live free or die’ attitude. She narrates her story in the film through interviews and visits the sites of her escapes. She even stands outsides the conversion camp and shouts insults over the walls to the instructor who beat her. Her defiance puts you in awe.

Also interviewed in the film is Xiaodi’s mum. Her mother fully participated in the transphobia towards her, committing her to the conversion camp and even returning her after her first escape attempt. Now, after it is clear Xiaodi would rather die than be broken by them, she has come to accept her daughter. But the relationship is strained by the damage done. Her mum sits knees tight together, handbag on lap, giving her version of events, as Xiaodi sits off to the side, out of focus, all attention on her phone. She only perks up to correct her mother when her attempts to minimise the abuse and trauma Xiaodi suffered strays into actual falsehood. “We didn’t know,” her mother says about the beatings at the conversion camp. “You did,” Xiaodi says, saying how she brought it up on their first visit to see her.

The betrayal sits between them. Her mother has accepted Xiaodi only as the last option, and her support for her transition is overdue and begrudging. Xiaodi is giving her mother the space to make amends, but tolerates no comfortable lies between them. The film does a good job of striking a difficult balance in its portrayal of her mother. It would be easy to paint her as simply monstrous, given the suffering her actions caused Xiaodi, but it eschews being so reductive. Neither does it forgive her, as though to throw up your hands and shrug, how could she have known? It holds her to account for bad choices she’s made, which caused real harm, and that she should have known better. And yet, it is the eternal issue of mothers raising daughters under patriarchy, in preparing them for the way the world will try to break and bend them, being the very conduit for that breaking and bending. It is an intergenerational pattern that can only be broken when you stand together and fight. And Xiaodi has a bravery for that, and for giving her mother a second chance to stand by her side while she does so.

A really interesting documentary about an extraordinary young girl.

Baby Girl is a short documentary about Cunenk, an Indonesian trans woman who is living with the loss of her mother. Her mother always told her to be a useful person, so Cunenk decides to raise money for the local hospital maternity ward in her memory.

We get to see Cunenk confident and outgoing in queer spaces and social media, turning her grief into joyful fundraising and community. The film also shows her negotiating more conservative spaces. At one point she receives a private donation from a well-to-do religious family, and must collect it from their home, so she calls ahead and lets them know she is a trans woman and discusses with them how to receive her. Without denying her transness, she opts to go in modest dress without make-up, wearing a pink shirt with elbow-length sleeves, and they sit together in their livingroom, discussing the work she hopes to achieve and providing her with cash to help her do so. Respectful balances are struck and common good is found.

It is a short documentary but a beautiful window into good being put into the world. The hopeful and nourishing sight of good people taking their pain and turning it into kindness for others.

In much the same tradition as getting a telegram from the Queen here, in the Philippines when you turn 100 you get a payment of 100,000 pesos from the government. Lola, a modest trans woman living alone in her small home, has waited patiently for a year for her payment to arrive. While her home help prattles endlessly on what she could use the money for, Lola is silent and peaceful. She is finally going to have her gender confirmation surgery.

Only one sadness still touches her. The photos on her table shows the love of her life, a man now passed and gone. She still dances with him in her loneliness.

His son is young and wild, and he has finally ended up in jail. Lola brings him food and sees in him what remains of the man she loved.

101 Butterflies is a quiet and sensitive story about what matters in life, with a rare and respectful portrait of a trans elder.