Directed by G. Chesler • Documentary • 2024 • 85 minutes
In an airborne pandemic when separation, isolation, and self-sufficiency became the punishing norm, many trans people faced the COVID-19 era differently. Connection | Isolation presents eight portraits of trans and post-gender people who cultivate community in this pandemic. The film also highlights how the pandemic gave some trans people more space to explore and understand their identities, community, and bodies.
Between portraits, we depict elegiac (re)enactments performed by trans people revisiting their core COVID-era memories: washing masks, wiping down groceries with disinfectant, and traveling alone to work at the hospital in an empty city. Archival moments flow into these scenes - news reports, memes that made us laugh, and web seminars on community care. Trans and queer people - a community most impacted by pandemics like HIV/AIDS- have built a culture undergirded by mutual aid. This became a model for resilience and care in the pandemic for those who listened. This film follows in that legacy.
Up Next in Trans Stories
-
Life is not a Competition, but I'm Wi...
Directed by Julia Fuhr Mann • Documentary • 2023 • 79 minutes
In a poetic-radical utopia, the film shakes up stereotypical gender relations in competitive sports. It searches for the queer-feminist potential in the Olympic running disciplines and sketches a world beyond rigid gender images.
If ...
-
Tales of the Waria
Directed by Kathy Huang • Documentary • 2011 • 57 minutes
Indonesia is home to the world’s largest Muslim population. It is also home to a transgender community known as warias, biological men who live openly as women. TALES OF THE WARIA follows four characters from this little-known community a...
-
Dressed in Blue (Vestida de Azul)
Directed by Antonio Giménez Rico • Documentary • 1983 • 98 minutes
One of the best trans films you’ve likely never heard of, Antonio Giménez-Rico’s landmark 1983 documentary Dressed in Blue (Vestida de Azul) explores the lives and loves of a group of six transgender women living in Madrid in the...
