Alas, all good things come to an end, and the FFM has been fun. Three films today...
Be Like Others
Tanaz Eshaghian - United States-United Kingdom-Canada-France - 74 min.
Farsi, eng. sub.
To be fair, there are many transgendered people in the world that feel that they were born with the wrong gender, and seek to fix that. This is not a film abou them. This is a documentary about a theocracy that has a solution for the "problem" of homosexuality. Homosexuality is punishable by death in Iran, by stoning or hanging. There’s immense pressure for gays and lesbians to conform, to go underground, by declaring themselves transsexual. The theocracy that is Iran made allowances for people born with the wrong gender, and what this amazing documentary shows is a few examples of young men so desiring to fit in that they’re willing to submit to sex-change surgery so they can be accepted into society. Historically effeminate gay men (who are but a percentage of all gay men ) have been singled out for abuse in a heterosexualist homophobic society, and in Iran it’s not different. Rather than be perhaps marked for death, they risk family disownment and societal rejection as transgendered women, even though some say to the moment of their operations (and even afterwards) that if they’d had the option not to go through with the sex change, they wouldn’t. A very, very sad commentary on the power of a theocracy to arbitrarily dictate who should act and look like whom.
One more short and a feature length to post!
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