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.
Her video diary is raw and melodramatic, something she embraces with humour, since she grew up watching telenovelas and has absorbed their rhythm into her own language. When she cries, she often laughs at herself seconds later. When she dreams of her new life, she does so with the same soaring intensity she once saw on television. The documentary lets these layers unfold without commentary, trusting the viewer to understand that this theatricality is not artifice but survival.
What distinguishes Alondra from many other transition narratives is the technique that Porta has perfected over years of work. Known for his use of self-filming in projects for Spanish and Catalan television, he once again places the camera in the hands of the protagonist. Alondra records eight months of her life. She films during work, during moments of despair in her small apartment, during telephone calls with friends who fail her, and during quiet nights when memories of her grandmother fill the room with an intimate warmth no one else gives her. This material forms the backbone of the documentary and is later complemented with interviews, archival footage and moments filmed by the crew. The camera is present but never hidden. Every person who appears knows it is there. This transparency offers an unusual kind of honesty that becomes the signature of the film.
The narrative then shifts to the other side of the world. Alondra boards a plane to Thailand carrying her camera and her dream. At the hospital in Phuket she encounters a kindness she had been starved of in Spain. Dr. Sanguan Kunaporn greets her with enthusiasm. Nurses fuss over her with gentle energy. For the first time since her grandmother’s death she feels held by a community that welcomes her without hesitation. She records every step of the medical process, from preoperative consultations to her own cheerful and slightly absurd farewell to her penis in the hospital bathroom. The scene is humorous and tender and speaks volumes about her courage and her need to ritualise something that had caused her so much suffering yet had been part of her life since childhood.
When the surgery begins, she hands the camera to the medical team. The film includes rare moments captured directly by the surgeon, giving the viewer an unusually close perspective on a procedure that thousands of people undertake each year in pursuit of their authentic selves. The aftermath is slow, painful and intimate. She documents her swelling, her fears, her moments of quiet triumph as she begins learning how to inhabit her new body. This is not a transformation that happens in a single moment but a process of daily discovery and emotional recalibration.
The final chapter takes Alondra from Thailand to the United States. She travels to New York City to see her mother who last saw her as Alberto, a teenager departing Venezuela to seek a future that always seemed to shrink the moment she reached for it. Her mother is deeply religious and has spent years thinking of a son who no longer exists in that form. The reunion is charged with fear and longing. The viewer watches Alondra walk toward her family, carrying both pride and trepidation. It becomes one of the most emotional sequences in the film because it brings together all the threads that have shaped her journey, the need for acceptance, the pain of separation and the hope that the people who once loved her can learn to love her again.
Throughout the documentary, Porta and Schleif resist the temptation to judge or narrate from above. Their style is observational and patient. Danielle Schleif, who brings experience from HBO and American documentary traditions, infuses the project with emotional intelligence and respect for the subject. The production companies behind the film, Porta Gaset and Bausan, add further weight, especially given that Bausan produced the Oscar-nominated documentary Balseros, another work grounded in migration and transformation.
The result is a piece of cinema that feels at times like a confession, at times like a testimony and at times like a cry for recognition. The scenes of sex work may unsettle some viewers but they are essential because they show the stark economic reality facing many transgender immigrants. The recordings before the surgery and the footage from inside the operating theatre are remarkable for their closeness, offering a rare visual explanation of a procedure often discussed but rarely seen. Above all, the personal reflections captured in real time as Alondra shifts between fear, conviction and hope give the film a depth that cannot be staged.
In the end, Alondra: Historia de una transexual stands as a document of profound personal change. It is not polished or comfortable. It is life recorded moment by moment, framed by a camera held by the very person fighting to reclaim herself. What emerges is a portrait of a young woman who understands that authenticity is costly but believes that pretending is far more expensive. Through laughter, pain, courage and stubborn faith in her own future, Alondra becomes the woman she always knew she was, and she does so before our eyes with a generosity of spirit that lingers long after the film ends.
via: youtube
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