Transgénérations

Director: Karine Solene Espineira
Release Year: 2010

Karine Solène Espineira’s documentary Transgénérations is not a film to be merely watched, but a work to be absorbed slowly, almost like a manuscript set to moving images. Released in 2010, it stands as both a playful experiment and a deeply scholarly meditation on how transgender women have been framed by cinema and television since the late 1950s. Espineira brings together fragments of films, talk shows, news reports, debates, and fictional scenes, forming a kind of audiovisual family album that compiles decades of seeing and misseeing, of fascination and fear, of clumsy curiosity and genuine admiration. The documentary is dense, layered, and unapologetically reflective, and it is structured around reading as much as listening. Words slide across the screen while music dominates the soundscape, inviting viewers to engage through reflection rather than passive consumption.

Alondra: Historia de una transexual

Director: Carles Porta and Danielle Schleif
Release Year: 2006

There are documentaries that observe from a distance, and there are documentaries that invite you to live inside someone’s skin. Alondra: Historia de una transexual, directed by Carles Porta and Danielle Schleif, belongs to the latter category. It is a film that does not simply show a transition but breathes alongside its protagonist, a young Venezuelan woman who has spent years fighting for the simplest and yet the most elusive desire, the chance to finally be herself. The film opens in Spain where Alondra lives as an immigrant between Madrid and Barcelona. She is twenty-five years old, resilient, vulnerable, and determined to transform the life that has rarely treated her kindly. She works nights on the streets, trying to gather enough money for the surgery that she believes will close the circle of her identity. Each euro saved brings her closer to a long-awaited appointment in Thailand, a place she spent a year petitioning for, chasing signatures, schedules and hope. In the darkness of the city she records her nightly routines with a gritty honesty that refuses to soften reality for the viewer. These scenes include moments with clients, long walks through cold streets and conversations with her own reflection as she muses about her loneliness and the fragile place she occupies in the world.

Saint Petersdrag

Director: Ivan Vydumlev
Release Year: 2019

The documentary Saint Petersdrag (2019) by Ivan Vydumlev unfolds as an intimate and unfiltered journey into the world of Russian drag, set against the monochrome backdrop of Saint Petersburg’s stern Soviet architecture. The city’s vast courtyards, heavy stone facades and bleak northern light form an almost symbolic contrast to the dazzling performers who burst into view, dressed in sequins, wigs and intense self-expression. Within this environment the drag and travesty community emerges as a defiantly vibrant counterculture, one that thrives in the shadows while building its own mythology, family structures and artistic traditions.

Unique en son genre

Directors: Ariane Mérillat and Bastien Mérillat
Release Year: 2018

Unique en son genre, the 2018 documentary by Ariane Mérillat and Bastien Mérillat, offers a thoughtful and intimate exploration of lives that do not fit neatly within the traditional boxes of “man” or “woman.” Rather than presenting transition as a simple before and after, the film invites viewers into the nuanced inner landscapes of five transgender people who navigate, question and sometimes transcend the binary conception of gender. What emerges is not a story about transformation alone, but one about authenticity, self-understanding and the courage to live beyond the expectations woven into society’s norms.

Juana on Fire

Director: Kristen Brown
Release Year: 2024

Kristen Brown’s 2024 documentary Juana on Fire opens with a quiet street in Santa Clara before dawn, the kind of street that seems to hold its breath. Then Juana Candela steps into the frame, and the hush dissolves. She walks with the steady confidence of someone who has fought long battles and learned, through grit rather than privilege, that dignity can be claimed even in places determined to deny it. As the first openly trans woman in Santa Clara, she carries her history in her posture. Brown’s film treats that history with the reverence and curiosity it deserves.