It’s 20th January, and I am walking back to my hostel on a high. I have just come out of the first press screening for Rye Lane, a British rom-com set in South London. The title refers to an iconic stretch of road that snakes down from Peckham High Street and is home to my favourite cinema in London: Peckhamplex.
The film follows Dom (David Jonsson) and Yas (Vivian Oparah) after a chance meeting at a mutual friend’s pretentious art exhibition in Peckham. Basically, Yas found Dom crying in the toilets because his ex (Karene Peter) cheated on him with his best friend Eric (Benjamin Sarpong-Broni). The duo gets to know each other as they wander around South London, in particular Peckham (an area I’m familiar with) and Brixton (an area I’m less familiar with). It was a surreal experience to watch Rye Lane in Utah, surrounded by Americans, seeing the streets I had walked down less than a week ago. Ooh we’re outside Peckham Rye Station! I was just there meeting a group of trans girls for brunch. Dear reader, I must also confess to letting out a little yelp when a scene took place in Peckhamplex.
The novelty of familiarity was not the only thing recommending the film to me. It is genuinely funny, frequently inventive, and plenty sweet. Jonsson and Oparah charm us just as much as they charm each other. Jonsson plays Dom an awkward sweetie, while Yas is a brash go-getter with an underlying vulnerability. Director Raine Allen-Miller also keeps the visuals popping by approaching every shot with irrepressible inventiveness. A fish eye lens here, a curious camera movement there, oh look, there’s a shirtless white guy leaning out a window in the background for no reason! It means that a scene as basic as a two-person conversation is constantly engaging you with fresh ideas and perspectives. I love it.
And that doesn’t even go into how fucking funny Rye Lane is. There were scenes where the audience was roaring with laughter. Sarpong-Broni’s performance as the traitorous himbo Eric is life-giving comedy. Yas’ account of her woker-than-thou ex is also a hoot. The line “tourism funds sex trafficking” shouldn’t elicit such a laugh, but funny’s funny.
As exciting as it was to see Rye Lane at Sundance, I did kind of want to see it with my London film friends (ideally in Peckhamplex). I simply cannot wait to see how British audiences will react to this film. It would seem that Rye Lane has arrived in 2023 to fulfill Nadira Begum’s Christmas wish for more romance in cinema. People who know me are eyerollingly aware that I usually utter the words “British cinema” with a certain amount of bile rising up in my throat, because of how bereft the industry is of creativity. Often hyping up mediocrities like Censor it’s an environment full of endless, empty backpatting. Rye Lane is a promising sign of what British cinema could be, should be.
So I felt like I was floating on a cloud as I was returning from the Rye Lane screening, although in reality I was trudging across icy pavements and keeping my hands stuffed in my pockets for much needed warmth. Earlier in the day I had checked my handbag for my estrogen patches as it was time to apply a new one and I thought I could do it in the Holiday Village Cinema toilets. They weren’t in my handbag. They must be in my suitcase, and that was why I was heading back to my hostel after Rye Lane. When I got back and rummaged through my suitcase to no avail, my cinema-induced euphoria curdled into dysphoric mortification. I had left my hormones in the UK.
The familiar thoughts rushed back into my brain. “Why are you so stupid?” “Way to go twat!” I had planned to go to a bar that evening but instead I decided to cocoon myself into my bunk. Suddenly the prickly redness on the bottom of my chin from a recent session of laser hair removal seemed to shine brighter than Rudolph’s nose and the stubborn remnants of stubble looked extra thick, extra dark. Why had I come here?
When I found out in November that I had been accepted onto the Sundance Press Inclusion Initiative and would receive a stipend of $3000, I knew that my duty was to see the trans films that were screening. These came down to four films: Joyland (which I missed when it screened at London Film Festival in October), Mutt, Kokomo City, and The Stroll.
If you’re reading this then you probably know that I’ve written about trans film for years now, and occasionally that writing has resonated with people. I say it is my “duty” because I don’t like the idea of cis critics writing about trans films out of festivals. In 2018, a cis male writer at Cannes asked me to proofread his four-star review of Lukas Dhont’s Girl to make sure it was “alright” on the trans stuff. I did so without complaint. Two years later I did the same thing for another cis male writer writing about a trans film, a writer who I now regard as a bit of a prick for unrelated reasons. These requests came with the unspoken acknowledgement that I would not be credited for my “proofreading”. It was unpaid help for writers more privileged than me. I acquiesced because I recognised my vulnerability as a trans woman writer. Experiences like this meant that I longed to be the one to cover films by and about trans people.
In 2021, Kaila Hier was kind enough to let me see Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair ahead of its world premiere at Sundance. I remain grateful for that opportunity, although I did avoid discussing the trans aspects of that film in my piece because:
a.) I knew other trans writers would cover it well.
b.) The trans stuff in that film hit a little too close to home for me, and my discussing it would involve writing about childhood memories I wasn’t ready to publicly disclose. Perhaps that’s cowardice on my part, but I don’t regret it.
That experience of writing about We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was a rare unequivocal bright spot in my time as a trans film critic. Thanks to Cyrus Cohen, whose support over the years I remain eternally grateful for, I spent much of 2020 and 2021 reviewing submissions for Newfest. This gave me access to lots of LGBTQ+ films, allowing me to further develop my tastes, clarifying what I was looking for in a trans film. Which brings me back to Sundance.
I was late to the party with Saim Sadiq’s Lahore-set Joyland, which had garnered a lot of press thanks to a couple of wins at Cannes, including the Queer Palm. Such a prize is not necessarily a marker of quality, because Lukas Dhont’s Girl had won it in 2018. The film made further headlines in November last year because it was briefly banned in Pakistan. Western media and the film industry salivated at this opportunity to show how “progressive” they are compared to the rest of the world when it comes to LGBTQ+ issues. The film is billed as a story about a man named Haider (Ali Junejo) who falls in love with a trans woman dancer named Biba (Alina Khan). I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call that a queer romance.
I watched Joyland just before I watched Rye Lane and in the first five minutes, I could tell that it was a well-made film. It was visually engaging, the blocking of characters was on point, and my curiosity was piqued. I left the screening troubled. First off, this is more a film about gender roles than it is about trans people. Biba is actually an ancillary character who fades away once she has served her purpose. The film is really about Haider and his wife Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq) and the pressure of expectation that falls on them as a married couple. When Haider gets a job at an exotic dance company (where he meets Biba), Mumtaz is forced to give up her own career as a talented makeup artist by Haider’s extended family, and is thus relegated to looking after her in-laws’ children, a role so unbecoming for a husband like Haider. Farooq is excellent as Mumtaz, a woman who must swallow indignity after indignity with each gulp becoming increasingly unbearable.
Haider’s an interesting character, because of his awkwardness and extreme sensitivity. He is unable to live up to the ideals of masculinity his father demands. Haider’s work with, and attraction to, Biba can therefore be read as an attempt to carve out an alternative form of masculinity. Therein lies part of my problem with the film as a trans woman. We’re all familiar with the the Manic Pixie Dream Girl cliché, in which a woman who’s “not like the others” helps the male character come out of his shell. I found Biba’s place in the story to be a trans variation on that androcentric trope. Biba is also largely seen in isolation from the Khwaja Sira. There’s one all-too brief scene where she is talking with other trans women, and we also learn that she witnessed the murder of her friend. There’s also a wedding scene for another one of her friends, but these are fleeting moments of trans community and interiority. We see Biba through Haider’s eyes. Yeah, a gaze interpretation isn’t original, but it goes some way to help explain my ambivalence towards the film as a trans woman.
Another aspect of Joyland I didn’t like was how the script treated Mumtaz. I won’t spoil things too much, but she ends up pregnant and unhappy about it, partly because she is more than aware of Haider’s infidelity. Things eventually take a turn for the upsetting, and I question the approach of vicariously traumatising the audience to make a feminist point, especially when it’s communicated as clumsily as the conclusion to Mumtaz’s story. For a film that is critical of rigid gender roles in Pakistani society, I could never escape the feeling of a male authorial hand hovering over the women’s stories in Joyland.
Joyland is being released in the UK next month, and I am obviously coming at it from the perspective of a white British person. However, I hope to see more critical readings of it in the run-up to that February release date. As a trans woman I think the character of Biba is familiar and non-threatening to UK cis people. She is straight, largely seen in isolation from her community, and is impossibly glamorous. While writing this piece I was shocked to learn that Khan is five years younger than me. I think I always associated feminine glamour with older women. This isn’t to say that Biba’s character is bad “representation” (I have come to loathe that word) or that Khan is the “wrong type” of trans woman. Just give me more variety of trans women on film! For fucks sake man!
I want the world for trans women in film and I want there to be room for our screen selves to be as messy and dykey as possible, unafraid to appear “ugly” to cis eyes. We should be seen chatting together, feuding with each other, and yes, fucking each other. Because it’s all so impossibly beautiful, open, and utterly against what British cis people want from us. They want us meek, or maybe a bit sassy in a way that’s safe, passable (read conforming to cis standards of attractiveness), and respectable, which here means as politically staid as possible. Maybe we can be gay but for god’s sake don’t flaunt it! You better not be dying your hair blue. Just be a nice, repressed middle-class couple worshipping at the altar of monogamy.
As you can probably tell at this point, I have a lot of hangups about being trans and British. It’s probably because I’m deeply repressed and spend an inordinate amount of time by myself. My HRT was kicked up a notch at the start of December and I am feeling the effects. No longer am I on dutasteride, which I always saw as the off-brand version of finasteride. Now I’ve joined the deca-gang and am much happier for it. Meanwhile I’ve upgraded to a slightly bigger estrogen patch. All it took was five years of lifelong trauma at the hands of the NHS bureaucracy and a piece of shit clinician called Dr Vikinjeet Bhatia. I could have gone DIY these last five years, but I was a stubborn bitch who didn’t want to buy her transition. I’m now living with the consequences of such self-righteous obstinance. The first week of 2023 was spent crying every day over every little thing. While shaving my legs I burst into tears listening to the audiobook of Jennette McCurdy’s memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died, because a detail about her abusive mother reminded me of my mum. All this crying meant I was scared about going to Utah. What if I can’t keep it together in the hostel and freak out all my roommates?
In the run-up to Sundance I tried to be more open about my lesbianism and then started going out with a guy off Grindr. I then couldn’t stop talking about all the guys I’d been with while at a lesbian club night the Saturday before I left for Utah. Surrounded by the most gorgeous dykes in all of the UK and this dozy cunt couldn’t get her mind off how great it was to melt into that Grindr guy’s arms outside the cocktail bar.
I tell you all this gross personal stuff to help you understand how I am doing at Sundance. It’s thousands of miles away from home, in the middle of the mountains, and I don’t know a single person here. I am more of a mess than usual, which is probably why I forgot to pack my estrogen. My hormones are going crazy and my tits keep aching. I’m worried that without estrogen my bones will turn into dust at any moment and my skin will become sandpaper. I feel it’s important for you to know this before I talk about my experience of attending the world premiere of Kokomo City.
Directed by D. Smith, Kokomo City is a documentary in which Black trans sex workers discuss their lives and their work. Smith, herself a Black trans woman, has two Grammys under her belt as a producer in the music industry, where she has worked with artists like Lil Wayne and Andre 3000. However she was marginalised from the industry after transitioning and instead focused her energy on film. Kokomo City is the result of that. Obviously, I was desperate to see this film at the earliest opportunity, which turned out to be the world premiere at the Egyptian Theatre on 21st January.
This was my first time on Main Street, and I only had an hour to get there after my previous screening The Disappearance of Shere Hite (decent doc). It was a Saturday afternoon and so traffic was thick. A volunteer suggested I walk it instead of waiting for a bus and so off I trudged just as the last vestiges of jet lag started to rally. I gave up halfway there and just waited for a bus to take me to Main Street. When I arrived at my bustling destination, I powered on up the icy slope to the Egyptian. By the time I got there I was tired, stressed and uncertain if my pass would get me in. I’m afraid my position confused the volunteers. The pre-screening scene was hectic with many people looking for help from someone with a sliver of authority. I was bounced between multiple people and told I needed to do a bunch of contradictory things.
Now, I don’t want this to be read as a call-out or an attempt to stir shit. As someone who started out volunteering at film festivals in 2013, I have a fierce sense of loyalty to festival volunteers that I don’t have towards film critics. With that in mind, I was repeatedly misgendered by staff and volunteers at the Egyptian theatre that evening. When one volunteer scanned my pass she said disbelievingly “this pass is meant to be for Cathy Brennan” I had to reply that yes, I am Cathy Brennan.
I know I don’t pass. It’s not something I really strive for. Lately, I’ve noticed my appearance has been veering towards that of a stereotypical radical feminist from the 1970s: round glasses, no makeup, sprawling tendrils of dark, unstyled hair. I looked in the mirror one day and saw a vague similarity between myself and a photo of Shulamith Firestone. Baggy jumpers with long black skirts are my go-to choices for an outfit. It connotes femininity while also concealing my figure. My voice is awfully deep and I haven’t had much desire to feminise it until recently. It is therefore understandable that strangers will misgender me, and 99% of the time it rolls off my back because I can tell when people are doing it to hurt me. I don’t have any ill will to the Sundance people working at the Egyptian that evening, but I also have to admit that it was upsetting to go to all this trouble to attend the world premiere of a trans film by a trans woman only to be reminded that I myself am not recognised as a trans woman.
I didn’t correct anyone over my gender because it was so busy, and I didn’t want to add to anybody’s stress. However, when I sat down in the theatre my feelings began to germinate, it made it more difficult to appreciate the film, which is why I watched it again at the press screening the following day.
Kokomo City is shot in black-and-white. Smith said after the screening at the Egyptian that she had made that stylistic choice because black and white means truth, referring to the phrase “plain as black and white”. This reminded me of the 2008 documentary Still Black: A Portrait of Black Transmen by Dr. Kortney Ziegler. That film, also shot in black and white, is a series of interviews with six Black trans men from a variety of backgrounds. Ziegler’s film is down-to-earth. It moves sequentially from one interviewee to the next, with each segment clearly signposted.
In contrast, Kokomo City flits back-and-forth between Daniella Carter, Dominique Silver, Koko Da Doll, and Liyah Mitchell, as well as a handful of men to provide outsider perspectives. Right off the bat, the Anecdotes and observations are often punctuated by reconstructions, skits and animation, lending the film a cheeky visual character. One image that sticks in my mind is a super slow-motion shot of Liyah lying on her bed smoking with a giant teddy bear in the foreground. Smith was able to build a great rapport with the women she interviews, giving their words a breezy informality that is infectious. An early moment shows Daniella doing her ablutions and she turns to us trans girls in the audience and recommends getting a Miss Corsair facial trimmer for a close shave. Let me tell you right now that women like her are the heroes. There are those girls who will go above and beyond for you unprompted. One of my classmates Elle came into class one evening and just gave me a bunch of dresses along with several weeks’ worth of estrogen.
Smith also utilises her music industry experience through the film’s soundscape giving a great deal of texture her footage through an eclectic selection of music. I was thrilled to recognise Mary’s Theme by Stelvio Cipriani, a piece that was originally part of the score for 1969 Italian thriller Femina ridens. While there were some sonic choices that threw me off a bit, all these stylistic flourishes tell us that this is Smith’s film and so it engenders a greater intimacy between us and her work.
Something I recognise when watching films like Kokomo City is the limits of identification through transness, when other facets of identity such as race, class, and nationality play such a crucial role in our personal makeup. Put more bluntly, I know I have more common with some cis white Sylvia-Plath-loving cunt whose parents live in the Shires than I do with the women in Kokomo City. And yet. And yet, I see a connection, threadbare though it may be. I listen to these women and recognise feelings on topics like the social pressure to pass as a cis woman, being treated as disposable by cis society, and living with the reality of transphobic violence. Even though I live a privileged life, I have been threatened with in real life and online, and it has come to affect my psychology. Recently I had a dream that someone slit my throat from behind, giving me the ability to fly invisibly. The women of Kokomo City, Daniella especially, speak with wisdom about their experiences as Black trans women and as sex workers. If I had to summarise Kokomo City in a single word, it would be that: wisdom. It’s because the knowledge being imparted to us as an audience is produced through experience, and I think the value in that is impossible to quantify. It’s too great. I suppose what I want to do as a trans film critic at Sundance, writing these words, is to record the fact that I was there watching films like Kokomo City, and I was listening.
I wanted to go to Sundance in person because I was desperate to escape the UK. Life feels awfully small there for a messed up trans woman. However, since my physical transition was kicked up a gear with the change in my HRT regimen, I have felt invigorated, and suddenly it felt more important to build myself up at home than watch films in Utah. This is especially true since I’ve burned most of my bridges with British film critics, and while I still like to write film criticism, I don’t want to do it according to the terms of a scene that it is inextricably bound to the institutionally transphobic British media. So yeah, my feelings coming into Sundance were conflicted. I knew I wasn’t going to get much in the way of commissioned work, and I was more concerned with looking after myself through my transition. Yet at the same time, I yearned for escape from a garbage island where I was marginalised and repressed by the media and political classes which have continually demonised me both as an individual and as part of a demographic.
I have this temptation that when Sundance is over, I will empty my bank account and retreat into the nothingness of America, never to return to Garbage Island. I understand that all across the US, anti-trans bills are threatening the rights of people like me. Just this week, a bill which would criminalise doctors for providing care to transgender youth moved one more step towards becoming law in the Utah state Senate. I’m old enough to know there is no utopia for trans women, and that we must build a better place for ourselves. Perhaps that’s why I have that desire to run away, and also why I won’t go through with it. The work I can do now is squeeze my way into these festival spaces, see films by and about trans people, and report back on them for any trans person who is interested. It’s not much, but it is something. I didn’t want to feign a mute professionalism in this piece. My hormones are currently in flux, exacerbated by my mistake in leaving my patches at home. I feel like I’m going crazy right now as part of my transition. It is therefore important to me that you got a sense of where I’m at as you worked your way through this piece. At the post-screening talk for Kokomo City, D. Smith stated this simple goal in making her film about Black trans sex workers: “I wanted us to be human.” By reading this piece I hope you get to see me as a fucked up tranny.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the Sundance Institute, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, Emerson Collective, Ford Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Netflix, Open Society Foundations, and Rotten Tomatoes for giving me $3000 so that I could write this piece.
Lastly, if you enjoyed this piece of writing, please consider tossing a couple quid my way so I can pay for hair removal stuff.