Khaled El Kurdi

Cinema Fouad is a documentary portrait of Khaled El Kurdi, a Syrian trans woman living in Beirut, where she earns a living as a domestic worker and belly dancer. Soueid shows us scenes of El Kurdi’s domestic world: eating, applying make-up, dancing in her bedroom, all while reflecting on her life and experiences. She expresses her desire to undergo gender reassignment surgery, and mourns the death of her lover, a Palestinian freedom fighter. She often alludes to the aggressions she faces outside of her home, and through her adept defiance in the face of some of Soueid’s more goading questions, we recognize the echoing of these aggressions in his role as interviewer.

Several characters realize their personal way to build their own identity from the choice of genre. Transsexual, transgender, crossdressing – the defining of terminologies different ways of looking at yourself are constantly rising, portraying a universe of possibilities, expanding the boundaries of the possible and permitted.

Bosom buddies BeV StroganoV, Ovo Maltine, Ichgola Androgyn and Tima die Göttliche are four Berlin drag queens who met in the mid 1980s. These four queens became Germany’s most popular drag performers and have been busy fertilizing the German cultural scene. Besides being performers, they are also political activists – in AIDS awareness, anti-gay violence, the sex workers movement and the struggle against the extreme right and racism. The film tells their story.

Trans women face extreme violence in Mexico City, and sex workers are even more vulnerable. This raw and deeply affecting portrait of Kenya gives an insider’s view of the impact that violence has on the community, and how complex life is for them. The film begins shortly after Kenya witnesses her friend Paola being murdered by a client. The film follows Kenya closely. Will the family accept burying Paola as she was: a flamboyant trans woman? Kenya approaches Paola’s loved ones with great respect and understanding—something she rarely experiences herself. When the murderer is released, she embarks on a lengthy battle for justice, backed up by her “sisters.”

In a small village in the south of the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands, filmmaker Kateřina Turečková meets 16-year-old Ben, interested in learning about their newly discovered trans identity in person. Ben seeks refuge for their true feelings in cyberspace, finding moments of happiness by using green-screen technology to imagine their possible future. The film indirectly captures the (mis)understanding and (non-)acceptance Ben faces at school, its focused insight rounded out by the filmmaker’s interviews with Ben’s mother and sister, who inadvertently embody everything Ben hates about themself.

Fragmentary perspectives on Human Rights and transgender (trans*) People in Turkey.  What remains at the place where a murder happened? What constitutes trans* life? How to cope with daily violence and hatred? We begin to search for traces. We follow the tracks of resistance and survival. We are collectors of the expelled. We gather fragments of trans* lives inspired by texts of Nazim Hikmet, Foucault, Benjamin and Zeki Müren. Trans*BUT is a documental research study driven by the question: “What keeps you going when all else falls away?”

In the first person, a documentary that shows us the experience of Vida Rodriguez, formerly Inocente Duke, in situations that the  Trans Law favors: what happens when entering a sauna, locker room, or a public service (even in the Congress of Deputies). An experience that, with respect and large doses of humor, brings us face to face with a law and its difficulties in its implementation.

Exterínio proposes a reflection on the lives of trans women in a city in the interior of Rio Grande do Sul, based on a murder that occurred in 2016. Memories, provocations, life stories that intersect in a plot about the difficulties of living and being trans in the interior of the country that most murders trans women in the world.