Framing Agnes,
dir. Chase Joynt, 2022, USA/Canada, 75m.
Saturday, June 18, 2022, 4:00pm Castro 👍
+Streaming
Transmasculine documentary filmmaker Chase Joynt and his collaborators found an old, forgotten file cabinet, rusted shut to the point it literally had to be pried open with a crowbar, containing transcripts of interviews by researchers with transgender subjects, including Agnes, who famously tricked the researchers into believing that she had an intersex condition in order to obtain gender-affirming surgery — and then returned, after multiple scholarly papers had been published, to reveal that she was in fact a transwoman. The file cabinet with Agnes’ interviews also held interviews with people whose stories had not been told publicly: a black transwoman, a teenage transman, and many more. The documentarians decided to stage the interviews, some in an academic setting and others on a TV talk show, to breathe life into the words on the page. Interspersed with those recreations are conversations with the reenactors about their own stories and their reactions to the transcript material. It’s a time capsule from the mid-20th century, wrapped with the thought process of how to relate to and how to present that history. Highly recommended.
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