Director: Jonas Benarroch
Release Year: 2020
Jonas Benarroch’s 2020 documentary Tránsito y felicidad is many things at once. It is an intimate portrait of late-life transition, a meditation on identity, a gentle argument for social recognition and, above all, a tribute to the stubborn human desire for happiness. Its protagonist, Rosa Maria, is fifty nine years old at the moment when she decides to complete her transition with gender affirming surgery. Her past, however, looks nothing like the life she is reaching for. She once lived as a stereotypical macho man, married twice, raising daughters, filling the role that society carved for her. The film follows the moment when that long tolerated performance finally gives way to authenticity.
Benarroch captures Rosa Maria on the threshold of surgery, a day that divides her life into a before and an after. She has spent decades inside a body read as male, while privately holding on to a truth that had no space in her conservative upper middle class upbringing. Social pressures pushed her to perform masculinity with discipline. She worked, married, fathered children and leaned into every expectation of virility, almost as if rehearsing a script she never chose. At fifty seven she finally came out. Two years later she went to the operating room, determined to give her inner life a home in her physical body.
The documentary opens at this pivotal moment, but it does not freeze her there. Instead, it follows her movement toward empowerment, and it does so with warmth through the presence of her friend Fina, also a trans woman in her sixties. The two women share scenes of camaraderie, vulnerability and determination. Their friendship becomes a second narrative of the film, a reminder that transition is not strictly personal but also shared, held, supported. Both women want something deceptively simple. They want to live as women in a society that still debates their right to exist comfortably.
Rosa Maria’s own narration gives the film much of its soul. She describes her surgery with disarming frankness. Her joy at discovering her new anatomy, her sense of recognition, her gleeful realization that desire now works differently for her, all of this unfolds with humour and a kind of unapologetic honesty. She speaks as someone who has waited a lifetime for her own reflection to make sense. Her words linger because they belong to a woman who has lost too many years to secrecy but refuses to lose even one more to shame.
Benarroch, who knew Rosa Maria since childhood, films her with tenderness but not without contrast. He insists on showing her physical presence as it is. Tall, broad shouldered, walking with a strong stride that evokes the man she once pretended to be, she cuts a figure that can initially confuse the viewer. At the beach she stands in a bikini, relaxed and beaming, her joy insisting that the eye adjust to her reality rather than the other way around. Her voice remains deep, something she refuses to apologize for. When people tell her that her voice makes her masculine, she answers simply that a voice does not define gender. In this refusal lies a powerful argument: femininity is not a checklist, and womanhood is not an audition.
The camera often follows her from behind as she moves through the streets, capturing a body that still carries traces of another life. But the documentary balances this corporeality with the way Rosa Maria assigns meaning to her world. She talks about the things she enjoys as a woman, the rituals she embraces, the new rhythms of her desire, her daily domestic habits, the ways she claims gentleness without losing any of her force. Her femininity is not about passing. It is about belonging to herself.
The film also opens space for the reactions of her relatives, and for the social and political atmosphere in which she and Fina continue their activism. After her operation, Rosa Maria becomes increasingly involved in local advocacy for trans rights, standing beside others who fight for recognition and visibility. Benarroch follows her not only as a woman reinventing herself, but as a citizen fighting to widen the borders of what her community considers normal.
The documentary’s seventy seven minutes unfold without sensationalism. There is no exaggerated drama, no tragic framing, no attempt to turn Rosa Maria into an object of pity or curiosity. Instead, Benarroch allows her to articulate her own identity. Near the end of the film she closes the whole debate on classification with one sharp declaration. She says that her category is happiness and her sexual orientation is none of anyone’s business. The documentary takes her at her word. It treats her life not as an anomaly but as another form of normal, one that has been denied visibility for too long.
Tránsito y felicidad is ultimately about that quiet normalisation. It shows a woman who has lived through conflict but refuses to be defined by it. It shows her joy, her contradictions, her resilience, the slow and uneven process through which she becomes fully herself. It is a story of transition, but also a story of arrival, and it does what the best documentaries do. It invites the viewer to look closely at one life, only to realise that the truth of that life says something universal about dignity, courage and the human right to fulfillment.
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