Director: Esther Prade
Release Year: 2013
Release Year: 2013
In WhatEver Will Be, filmmaker Esther Prade delivers a raw and unflinching exploration of identity, intimacy, and the painful complexity of human connection through the intertwined lives of two transgender women, Cilla van Opstal and Ilona Willemars. Once bonded by their shared experience of living on society’s margins, the women find their friendship slowly unraveling in the face of conflicting desires, identities, and definitions of what it means to be a “real” woman. What begins as a story of solidarity transforms into a piercing commentary on rivalry, disillusionment, and the fragility of chosen families.
The documentary, completed after years of patient observation, is as much a portrait of the protagonists as it is a reflection of the filmmaker herself. Esther Prade doesn’t position herself behind a protective lens. Instead, she ventures into the emotional terrain of her subjects with a personal curiosity that subtly mirrors her own relationship to the themes of the film, difference, transformation, and the longing for belonging. At the heart of WhatEver Will Be is Cilla van Opstal, a Black trans woman in her mid-forties, whose dilemma over gender-affirming surgery has shaped her identity and circumstances for more than two decades. Cilla has long inhabited the ambiguous and hypersexualized space often imposed on trans women who, by choice or circumstance, do not undergo genital surgery. Her existence, part woman, part object in the eyes of others, is both empowered and constrained by this unresolved state. Into her life comes Dennis, a successful, if closeted, corporate lawyer in his fifties who presents publicly as male but privately yearns to explore femininity. When Cilla, broke and homeless, moves into Dennis’s apartment in Rotterdam, their relationship begins as a transaction of mutual need, emotional support, practical advice, and a kind of quiet mentorship. But when Dennis begins transitioning into Ilona and embraces a more visible and medically supported transformation, the careful balance collapses.
Cilla sees Ilona not as a kindred spirit, but as an interloper, someone who has the resources and privilege to pursue womanhood, but who, in Cilla’s eyes, lacks the authentic gendered pain and deep-rooted femininity that define “true” transsexuality. To Cilla, Ilona’s journey feels like performance, not identity. What once bonded them, a struggle to belong, now divides them in painful, irreconcilable ways. As Ilona moves forward with surgery and legal recognition, Cilla stands still, not out of indecision, but because of a complex web of socio-economic barriers, internalized doubt, and an unyielding attachment to a version of womanhood that is forged in adversity. The contrast between them intensifies. Ilona’s access to medical transition and social validation threatens Cilla’s lived legitimacy. Their disagreements turn into accusations. What was once camaraderie turns bitterly into competition. Esther Prade captures these shifts not through exposition, but through prolonged scenes of domestic tension, unspoken resentment, and emotional withdrawal. She rarely interferes, but her presence is always felt.
The camera lingers on quiet confrontations and intimate conversations, bearing witness to the moment when shared struggle becomes personal betrayal. The documentary refuses easy sympathy, it doesn't villainize either woman but instead shows how trauma, survival, and identity politics can fracture even the deepest of bonds. What sets WhatEver Will Be apart from other documentaries about transgender lives is not only its intimate access or emotional depth, but its director’s self-awareness. Prade does not merely observe; she reveals, subtly, that her own journey mirrors those of her subjects. While the film never centers her story, she admits to discovering unexpected parallels between her stance in life and the choices made by Cilla and Ilona. This gives the documentary a third dimension, a reflective undercurrent that elevates it from a character study to a broader meditation on difference, self-definition, and the unspoken loneliness of transformation. By following the women over several years, Prade allows the story to breathe, unfold, and fray naturally.
The eventual dissolution of their friendship is not dramatized, it is allowed to ache, quietly and authentically. Viewers are left to sit with discomfort, to witness what happens when solidarity gives way to skepticism, and when two versions of femininity cannot coexist within the same fragile alliance. WhatEver Will Be boldly interrogates the notion of authenticity in gender. What does it mean to be a “real” woman? Who gets to decide? Cilla, shaped by decades of marginalization, clings fiercely to a model of trans womanhood that is painful, visible, and irrevocably transformative. Ilona, emerging from the safety of male privilege, may seem to glide into her womanhood with relative ease, medicalized, legitimized, and unrecognizable to the Cilla who once embraced her as a sister. Yet neither woman finds peace. Their paths diverge, but both remain haunted, by societal rejection, by internal doubt, and most painfully, by the loss of each other.
In the end, WhatEver Will Be is not just about being different. It’s about the cost of becoming who you are. Esther Prade’s documentary doesn’t seek resolution or redemption. It leaves us with the ache of questions that remain unanswered and relationships that remain unresolved. And that is its greatest strength. As a film, it is uncompromising in its honesty and unapologetically intimate. As a story, it is both specific and universal. And as a document of trans lives, it challenges viewers to look beyond the binary narratives of triumph or tragedy and to sit with the beautiful, difficult truth: that identity, like friendship, is never fixed, and that sometimes, whatever will be, is heartbreakingly out of our hands.
via: Vimeo
memphisfilm.net and imdb
Image credits: Vimeo
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