Karina on SpoutBlog

Friday at LAFF brought back-to-back screenings of two very different documentaries about how sexual politics and policies within two individual communities come to define these worlds-apart spaces. Sarah Friedman and Esy Casey’s Thing With No Name follows two women in sub-Saharan African villages as they controversially begin a program of anti-retroviral drugs after having been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS.  Undeniably beautiful to look at and powerfully poetic in its depiction of a community of women stricken with poverty and sick with a virus that they don’t fully understand, the film ironically and sadly fails at its propagandist mission when tragedies of timing and fate intervene. Meanwhile, Trinidad offers a portrait of the titular “sex change capitol of the world,” a frontier town in Colorado where a male-to-female post-op transsexual rockstar surgeon named Marci is pioneering the art and science of genital reassignment surgery. In tone and content these films couldn’t be more different, but they still constitute a sort of double feature of films about real people living lives impacted by scientific attempts to customize fate.

Trinidad begins with rapid-fire testimonials about the town from three women who look like your conservative aunt, but sound like your gay uncle. We learn that the town has been a destination for sex change operations––mostly male-to-female; female-to-male operations are also done, but far less frequently, in part because “the technology” is not as advanced on that end––since the mid-60s, when a local plastic surgeon began performing them at the request of a social worker. When that biologically male doctor retires, former gynecologist Marci moves to town and takes over the practice. With business booming, two of Marci’s former patients start building Morning Glow, a halfway house of sorts where post-op patients can settle into their new bodies with the support of those who have been through the procedure and the psychological transition.

Trinidad suffers from a lack of consistency in tone and concern. Oddly, though the subjects themselves are treated with the utmost respect and each treats the camera with increasing confidence in return, directors Jay Hodges and PJ Raval show an overall lack of tact with some of their visual choices. We move quickly from crudely drawn diagrams to long, lingering close-ups on graphic photographs of completed surgeries; later, the camera takes us directly into the operating room for a view of a suregery-in-progress that’ll be unsettling to anyone even remotely squeamish about blood, regardless of their personal attitude towards genital reassignment. Trinidad will inevitably find a cult following amongst anyone who really wants to see various varieties of man-made vagina on a big screen; the problem is not that this stuff is in there at all, but that it’s so unexpectedly graphic, and there’s so much of it, that it threatens to overwhelm the filmmakers’ subtler, more insightful and exciting findings

For instance: Trinidad shifts gears in its second half to examine how members of the community of transsexuals in town struggle to establish and broadcast their true identities through their new bodies, which inevitably leads to conflicts both with the other couple of thousand residents of the town and amongst one another. There seems to be a learning curve, where the girls move from endearingly tacky stylistic choices and cultural references (The Vagina Monologues is quoted as philosophy; frosted bangs and lavender abound) to a more mature sense of how to express femininity. As the daughter of one of the Morning Glow owners puts it, when these ladies get their new bodies, “It’s like they’re 13 all over again.” Adolescents at age 50, they rush to move through years of identity formation as quickly as possible.

You’d think, as the doctor responsible for most of their surgeries, Marci would be supportive of this process, but instead she seems to look down on the girls who come out of the OR with fully-functional new genitals but gender identities still not fully-formed. At one point, she visits Morning Glow and scolds the ladies there for laying out tablecloth in the wrong color for the season, as if she’s the old pro impatiently waiting for the amateurs to catch up. It’s a completely unnecessary argument, and it’s completely revealing. If Trinidad often seems to lack serious stakes, it may be because there’s not enough of this kind of material focusing on the basic conflicts of everyday life, which say more about the day-to-day experience of living in this town than any glimpse at the surgeries themselves ever could.

Based on stakes that are literally life-or-death,Thing With No Name immediately engrosses by dropping us straight into a land that had just begun to recover from the racial struggles of the 20th century (”Things improved,” says one of the few men seen on screen. “The police stopped arresting and beating up black people.”) when HIV/AIDS started to ravage the community. We’re taken into two rural Zulu villages, each populated by a few extended families worth of women. Husbands, brothers and fathers are either at work in Johannesburg, where they contract the virus and bring it home, or they’ve already been eliminated by sickness or crime. There’s no electricity––women sleep on mats on the floor and take their drug cocktails by candlelight––and only a handful of medical clinics to serve a wider community of a hundred thousand people.

The crush of people fighting for these limited medical resources are one reason why neither of the film’s subjects, Ntombeleni and Danisile, are aware that they’ve contracted the HIV virus until they’ve become sick enough to be diagnosed with full-blown AIDS; another factor is the reluctance to directly address the epidemic in the community. The virus that’s systematically decimating the population is as likely to be referred to by its clinical name as by a variety of sadly poetic referents, including “Decimator of the Nation.” Women educate one another through singing traditional tribal songs that name drop the names of AIDS drugs (”We saw Stocrin/ We saw Stavir 50″) like rappers reel off brands of bling. Not entirely confident that the mysterious cocktails of pills are working in the longterm when they seem to do little but induce dementia in the short term, local nurses drum up home remedies to salve individual maladies to combat specific pains.

The film, which tracks the progress of both women over the course of several summer months, moves slowly, and that seems fitting. These patients are essentially playing a waiting game––waiting for information, waiting for care, waiting to see how the drugs will affect them, and inevitably waiting to die. As an aid worker puts it in the film, it’s impractical to look at the current state of the epidemic as a fight against death; instead, they’re “fighting the inhumanity of silence.” But the pacing is a major reason why the tension of this place with no electricity but fledgling access to high-tech miracle drugs pops off the screen. There’s an inherent sadness to a portrait of a place where education has to focus on reacting to infection rather than preventing it, because the sanctity of these women’s sexual lives––due to a combination of rampant rape and their husbands’ cultural indifference to sexual fidelity––are completely out of their own control. With its painterly images fields on fire and patient portraits of faces in quiet pain, the film itself harnesses that tension, and joins the fight as a teaching tool played in the key of fine art.