Director: Klaus Wildenhahn
Release Year: 1993
In Freier Fall: Johanna K., the legendary documentary filmmaker Klaus Wildenhahn offers not just a portrait, but a raw, unvarnished glimpse into a life on the edge of identity, society, and survival.
Filmed in 1993, this deeply personal and often painful film captures the thoughts, reflections, and lived reality of Johanna Kammermans, an older transgender woman whose body, past, and psyche carry the scars of a complicated journey.
Wildenhahn, known for his cinéma vérité approach, lets Johanna speak. There is no narration, no dramatic soundtrack, no moralizing. Just Johanna, in her own words, in her own spaces, grappling with the consequences of a lifetime of transition, self-discovery, and medical trauma. And what emerges is nothing less than breathtaking.
Johanna speaks of her body with brutal honesty. Her transition, pursued through a combination of surgeries and silicone injections, has left her in physical pain and ongoing medical distress. “This silicone is devil’s stuff,” she says.
After six operations to remove silicone that kept migrating in her face, she describes how it continues to haunt her, reappearing like a phantom. Her face and her body are no longer battlegrounds, the war, in a sense, is over, but the landscape still bears deep wounds.
Yet Johanna refuses to be reduced to her suffering. She talks about her engineering work in the Netherlands with pride, showing maps and documents detailing her contributions to the great dike-building projects following the devastating North Sea flood of 1953. "This little piece between North Beverland and Walchern," she says, pointing on a map, "I built that." There’s something heroic about it, the woman who built dikes to hold back the sea, while her own life felt like it was constantly underwater.
The film’s title, Freier Fall ("Free Fall"), is chillingly apt. Johanna speaks of her life not as a steady climb but as a descent, often uncontrolled. Her words about gender are layered with complexity. “I felt transsexual. In my eyes, it was different from homosexuality... I now know I'm unsexual, and I've behaved transsexually. That's what I've learned.”
In a time when even the word “transgender” was rarely understood, Johanna was carving out her own definitions, resisting easy categories. She expresses frustration with how others, doctors, psychiatrists, even other trans people, tried to box her in. “You try for 20 years on a path... and then you find out that it's basically homosexuality,” she reflects. There's no clear resolution here. No easy moral. Just someone trying to make sense of a life lived across boundaries, identities, and societal expectations.
Perhaps most moving is Johanna’s insistence on visibility, even if she knows it won’t be easy. She talks about being alone, about the suitcase she keeps in Holland and a family that seems distant. And yet, despite all this, she ends the film not with bitterness but with presence. “I feel comfortable sitting here,” she says. It’s a quiet victory. The victory of still being here.
Wildhahn’s camera, patient and respectful, allows Johanna to unfold herself without interruption. There are silences, confusion, and moments where language fails. But in those gaps, something real happens, something rare. We don’t just watch Johanna, we witness her.
And she is unforgettable.
Image credits: YouTube
Other publications about Johanna Kamermans:
Interview with Johanna Kamermans
Johanna Kamermans (born 1938) is a writer, translator, and former striptease dancer from the Netherlands. With a career spanning nearly 15 years, she worked in prestigious cabarets...
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