Cinema Fouad

Tie and Red Nail

March 2014 •Portuguese

Several characters realize their personal way to build their own identity from the choice of genre. Transsexual, transgender, crossdressing – the defining of terminologies different ways of looking at yourself are constantly rising, portraying a universe of possibilities, expanding the boundaries of the possible and permitted.

Demétrios

July 2022 •Portuguese

Performative and expository documentary, which highlights the contrast of experience among transgender men in Brazil. The short film brings five characters - Kenai, Caetano, Augusto, Pietro and Daniel -, each one reflecting a different reality.

Queens Don’t Cry

February 2002 •German

Bosom buddies BeV StroganoV, Ovo Maltine, Ichgola Androgyn and Tima die Göttliche are four Berlin drag queens who met in the mid 1980s. These four queens became Germany’s most popular drag performers and have been busy fertilizing the German cultural scene. Besides being performers, they are also political activists – in AIDS awareness, anti-gay violence, the sex workers movement and the struggle against the extreme right and racism. The film tells their story.

Playout

October 2023 •Italian

A short documentary which, starting from the experience of its five protagonists, takes us inside the team which presents itself not only as a tool for access to sport, but also as a political means for the entire transgender community to claim its identity and all rights denied.

Jean-Gina B.

January 1984 •French

This film is based on the true story of Jean Bella, who served as an officer in the Belgian Marine while being convinced, from an early age, that he was in fact a woman. Director Jean-Pol Ferbus follows Jean Bella and makes him talk about his life, psychological and spiritual experiences and reveals the true poet who remained undisclosed for most of this person's life. The film ultimately isn't about transexuality but about loneliness one can experience when he/she feels very deeply that she/he belongs to the two sexes and this in a deep, almost religious, fashion, to such an extent that sexuality itself is being erased from one's life. Jean-Gina Bella is a woman in the body of a man who bravely lived a life on the sea, eventually fighting the elements, talking to God when lost on the immense solitary ocean. This testimony is a very touching and poetic one.

Why Do I Feel like a Boy?

October 2019 •Czech

In a small village in the south of the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands, filmmaker Kateřina Turečková meets 16-year-old Ben, interested in learning about their newly discovered trans identity in person. Ben seeks refuge for their true feelings in cyberspace, finding moments of happiness by using green-screen technology to imagine their possible future. The film indirectly captures the (mis)understanding and (non-)acceptance Ben faces at school, its focused insight rounded out by the filmmaker’s interviews with Ben’s mother and sister, who inadvertently embody everything Ben hates about themself.

Et il voulut être une femme

October 1977 •French

A look on transvestites and transsexuals in early 80's Paris. The documentary focuses on Elisa, a Brazilian transvestite and ends with a filming of a surgical operation male to female.

Wërapara

June 2023 •Spanish

Amidst the Colombian Andes, a group of trans women from the Embera Chami community make their way into the international fashion scene, empowered through artistic collaboration and creation while preserving their spiritual heritage and ancestral connection to their territory.

Spectrum

March 2016 •Greek

Through personal stories, the documentary approaches the issues of gender identity and legal gender recognition in Greece. The three main characters explain how society has treated them, by narrating their experiences from the past and the present.

Where Love Lives: A Story of Dancefloor Culture & Expression

March 2021 •English

Documentary by the music label Defected and its brand Glitterbox about electronic music, its beginning in New York and its importance for minorities all around the world.

Orlando, My Political Biography

September 2023 •French

Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel "Orlando: A Biography" follows the centuries-spanning life of a young nobleman who awakens to find that they are a woman. Almost a century after its publication, Paul B. Preciado claims that fiction has become reality and Orlando's story lies at the root of all contemporary trans and non-binary life.

Extermínio

June 2021 •Portuguese

Exterínio proposes a reflection on the lives of trans women in a city in the interior of Rio Grande do Sul, based on a murder that occurred in 2016. Memories, provocations, life stories that intersect in a plot about the difficulties of living and being trans in the interior of the country that most murders trans women in the world.

We've Been Around

March 2016 •English

In this documentary, director Rhys Ernst tells the previously untold histories of transgender pioneers. Trans people have always been here, throughout time, often hidden in plain sight.

Jeanne d'Trans

November 2016 •Finnish

The candid adventures of a straight filmmaker in world of transvestites, trans-genders and other gender minorities. Documentary explores our traditional gender roles through the experiences of people who challenge them all. Interviews include various Burlesque - artists, female pastor and Europe's only transsexual pro-wrestler who body-slams traditional gender roles in a profession, where the norms of gender are narrowly defined.

Gendernauts: A Journey Through Shifting Identities

June 1999 •English

Monika Treut explores the worlds and thoughts of several female to male transgendered individuals. As with Treuts first film, Jungfrauenmaschine, Gendernauts, enters a minority sector of San Fransisco culture. The characters in this film have a lot to complain about, and they do. They are people whose physical appearance (female) does not match their inner sexual identity (male). The subject is pinpointed in the film independant of sexual orientation. Leave your conservative hats at the door, this is going to need your special attention.

LARRY (they/them)

December 2024 •English

A young non-binary trans photographer, Laurence Philomène asserts themselves as one of the most original and inspiring voices of their generation and an icon of the LGBTQ+ community. Revealing both Laurence's intimate world and creative process, "LARRY (they/them)" paints a luminous and committed portrait of the complex and often misunderstood multiplicity of trans and non-binary identities and experiences.

How I Became a Woman

February 2024 •Spanish

In the first person, a documentary that shows us the experience of Vida Rodriguez, formerly Inocente Duke, in situations that the Trans Law favors: what happens when entering a sauna, locker room, or a public service (even in the Congress of Deputies). An experience that, with respect and large doses of humor, brings us face to face with a law and its difficulties in its implementation.

Laws of Love: Innocently Outlawed!

November 1927 •German

A documentary by Magnus Hirschfeld, which contains a shortened version of Different From the Others (1919).

Trans*BUT — Fragments of Identity

April 2015 •Turkish

Fragmentary perspectives on Human Rights and transgender (trans*) People in Turkey. What remains at the place where a murder happened? What constitutes trans* life? How to cope with daily violence and hatred? We begin to search for traces. We follow the tracks of resistance and survival. We are collectors of the expelled. We gather fragments of trans* lives inspired by texts of Nazim Hikmet, Foucault, Benjamin and Zeki Müren. Trans*BUT is a documental research study driven by the question: “What keeps you going when all else falls away?”

AmbulaTório

November 2019 •Portuguese