A seemingly empty hotel in Thailand—conference rooms, staircases, bedrooms—is where countless trans individuals have come to “make [their] biggest dream comes true,” says Victoria Verseau. Through this unique place of dwelling is how the Swedish artist and filmmaker introduces us to the multifaceted nature of this site: “a place that contains our stories”, a dually fraught and joyful place of affirmation and transformation. After world premiering last in Karlovy Vary’s Proxima Competition, Trans Memoria most recently played in the Horizons sidebar at Tromsø International Film Festival, dedicated to acclaimed films that engage with the human experience in a meaningful way. The film was also announced as heading next to South by Southwest, where it will undoubtedly find an exciting new audience.
Narrated in first person by Verseau herself, her film Trans Memoria is not just a diary (“I’m not sharing what happened with anyone but you,” she says) but an autoethnographic journal of sorts, with the film as her qualitative data, and it’s up to the viewer to do their own analysis. Verseau’s documentaryopens with manual selfie footage, a somewhat “archival” image itself. With a 2010s digital camera placed in front of a hotel mirror, the filmmaker soliloquises about her post-operative state, a worried aura perfectly detectable below her weak smile. In the “present”, she brings the viewer and two other trans women, Athena and Aamina, back to Thailand where she underwent gender-affirming surgery in 2012, there to not only confront memories but also to loosely guide her companions. Hanging low over their journey is the ghost of Verseau’s friend Meril, having also undergone surgery there but later having committed suicide alone; the filmmaker, early on, introduces the other two to the very room in which Meril stayed. Together, the three (and perhaps one could say four) partake in candid conversations that reveal their worries, fears, hopes, and desires.
Granted, personal accounts of difficult circumstances do not have to mean trauma porn; not once during Trans Memoria is the viewer made to feel as if they are meant to take pity on the film’s subjects. Rather, it’s a privilege that they are even able to bear witness to testimony that society would rather obscure away for one reason or another. Cispatriarchal social norms dictates that either trans folks are meant to be grateful that they can undergo the procedure and aren’t meant to be complaining—as some of the rhetoric suggested in the film—or cis folks don’t feel comfortable hearing about it. Trans Memoria reaffirms that the situation is exceedingly more complex: for many trans individuals, medical transition is “do or die”—and even if you do, the other outcome isn’t guaranteed to disappear.
The additional power in Verseau’s approach lies in never shying away from the grittiness and pain of the entire process of medical transition, both mental and physical. We learn what it takes, in effect, to maintain her newfound body, which ultimately requires rigorous and painful daily exercises. Multiple timelines come into play: the time intensiveness of maintaining drastic corporeal changes to one’s body further becomes clear, just as time seems to stop when they enter Meril’s former hotel room. Life goes on, but what is captured through film is frozen as an archive into which we are meant to entrust ourselves.
The filmmaker combines extraordinarily intense self-archival footage of herself—including moments of her after her surgery as she tries to form words through a flood of sobs stemming from overwhelming pain—with present-day encounters with the others who are preparing to undergo surgery themselves. Her obstinate refusal to glamorise is what makes the film hit home so dramatically: encounters between the three onscreen are occasionally confrontational, even hostile. There’s a sisterly attitude, but it’s not all coming up roses. Even visually, the material is left “raw”, as if the work was intentionally not fully colour-graded, with a grey hue settling over the whole work. The three are not there to simply pat each other on the backs and offer a shoulder to cry on if they feel sad. Differences in opinion further complicate their story together, once again challenging normative narratives about support and kinship.
This becomes one of the cracks that the filmmaker hammers into with both a delicate touch and full force. “Is there not going to be any hope in this movie?” says Athena. “But there is, I think”, goes Victoria’s reply. Most vibrantly, she confronts head-on the dualistic concept that medical transition is a one-size-fits-all solution that eases all troubles. The frustration that occurs when one achieves something they’ve wanted or needed for a long time, only to still feel unhappy or dissatisfied—or occasionally, even more frustrated—is a wholly universal sentiment. The alternative is to suffer in silence, in the best-case scenario.
Phone conversations and quiet moments are accompanied by visuals of decaying natural materials and wilting flowers, while nature becomes the centrepiece of the group’s outings as they search for the beach and walk in the grass. The passage of time is innately connected with the human experience, the film seems to suggest, but we must go capture it now while we can. This is still the case even if we are disappointed when we find out our greatest desires don’t live up to our expectations. Because what else can we do but simply try?
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Watch the trailer for Trans Memoria here:
