2022 Directed by Trâm Anh Nguyễn
Archive footage from 2006 - 2010 of a young girl growing up during the ages of four to eight. Only fragments of what is remembered exists. Words from a transgender man float to the surface as fleeting memories go on.
/ to boyhood / i never knew him /
Canada
Vietnam
Canada
Vietnam
/ an ever growing age of the digital world & globalization & of being filmed & watched & when our love letters turned into text messages. to the lost memories of when i knew childhood before the age of eight. i remember being a girl but i don't. /
/ at age nine, my life changed forever as puberty was the worst & best thing that happened to me. i was bleeding before i knew why i cried. the past can be too painful so we forget subconsciously. i forget my own girlhood to be a boy & a man. i tell myself it would only hurt less that way. /
/ i don't speak for all trans experiences, but this was mine & it was heartbreaking…
this body was never mine, but this body was mine. this body never should've been mine, this body is mine. this body will be mine. for always.
Shattering, didn't think it was possible for such succinct images to so fully pummel me and invoke bone-deep but unplaceable feelings that bridge my current mind to my mind as a kid.
it's here, it's like 4 minutes long, it's worth it
Trâm Anh Nguyễn has made two of my favourite short films this year (go check out Hoa!), and a big part of my love for his films is how well he translates digital memories to the screen, with an understanding of what becomes of an image (how it warps itself to fit new, ever-changing formats and resolutions, or what happens when time makes the image a sole survivor of something lost), and what becomes of a person after an image. I look forward to whatever comes next, this is really beautiful and means something to me in a way that i'm sure only images can capture.
/ i got a glimpse of boyhood, & i stayed. but sometimes it doesn’t feel enough, i’ve known & i’ve accepted now that i’ll always live in this boyless body — whatever that means. rewatching this was already a lot to take in, let alone showing it on a big screen for the first time with me being there with an in-person audience. it felt like we were all watching my life pass me by — because it did — what used to feel like the longest years of my life now are just another old memory i don’t really think about longer than a few seconds, maybe unless they come from a dream. my body remembered deeply after every rewatch as…
interesting. this 4 minute short is a blurred montage of archival footage of a trans man's childhood while a poem about transness is spliced across the screen. i think it's pretty good, as it really captures the haziness of childhood memories, specifically in the context of a distinct time before transness was felt or discovered. i imagine a lot of trans people can relate to the feeling of remembering Before, but as this short expertly showcases in the abstract, those memories are fleeting and increasingly hard to differentiate as time goes on. still, as difficult as it can be to recall such blissful ignorance before things began to feel amiss, there's a great deal of beauty in transness that i…
A short film showing video of a trans man as a child, with text overlaid. I like the mix of the nostalgic-style family home video footage with the text on top contrasting this greatly. Although it made the text harder to read (likely on purpose), the scrolling text created the idea that all of these thoughts were happening at once/intrusive thoughts, overlapping and overwhelming him as an adult, looking back at this footage. It gives us, the viewer, a sense of something being off, the idea that, yes, this was him, but at the same time, it isn't *really* him. He must now move on from the past and live authentically as himself, knowing that he'll never get that "boy's childhood" which he wanted - I related, but in a trans femme perspective.
