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This weekend’s Oregon Trans Film Festival comes at a critical moment.
“I’m excited to celebrate trans artists telling their own stories in a year when our stories are being deleted, distorted, and invalidated,” Liam Whitworth, the festival’s organizer, said in a statement to WW. “We’ve seen a wave of gender-nonconforming people arriving in Oregon seeking refuge from states where oppressive legislation threatens their safety and dignity. Many urgently need kinship, support, and belonging. That is part of why I wanted to curate this festival, to honor their courage and vulnerability.”
The festival includes two components: an in-person screening Sunday that will feature seven short but mighty films featuring either a trans director, writer or lead actor. That event will include a filmmaker Q&A and a post-event social mixer. A cash prize of $100 will be given to the best film in the show. Ticketholders will also be given a link to watch the remaining nine entries—roughly two additional hours of content—at their leisure.
The selected films range from three to 27 minutes and place a special emphasis on Oregon trans stories, experiences and lives.
Whitworth is the founder of Future Prairie, the nonprofit host of the event; he also curated this year’s offerings. Whitworth is a transmasculine poet and experimental filmmaker from Oregon who has performed on many impressive stages, including The Moth, the Segerstrom Center for the Performing Arts, and the Museum of Contemporary Art. The festival is co-sponsored by the Portland Events and Film Office and propertyweirdos.com .
The inaugural festival’s offerings include a range of genres and styles: animation, documentary, narrative film, experimental film and music videos. A few notable entries:
• The Last Gay Dinosaur, directed by Dobby Morse, is a claymation short in which a dinosaur contracts the mysterious “Heterosexual Disease.”
• Let It Out, directed by Missy Capone, is a Portland-backdropped music video for Atlas Charmaine’s debut single from her upcoming EP A Million Ways to Mourn Your Mother.
• A New Creation Story, directed by The Black Trans Prayer Book, blends animation, poetry, music, and performance to reimagine the creation of the universe through Black trans cosmology. It’s written and performed by Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi.
• Ginger Yifan Chen’s Break My Heart is a narrative short in which two nonbinary bookstore employees’ easy, intimate relationship is disrupted by a new romantic interest.
• Eve is a watercolored animated short directed by Jesse Kogita that traces the emotional terrain of transition.
Another festival offering, J Jackson’s T-Boy Wrestling, examines the same subject as a recent WW cover story and wears an extra layer of controversy coveralls. This short documentary spotlights night two of a transmasculine wrestling match held last October. The event, founded by Adam Bandrowski and Mich Miller (Trans Dudes of LA), took some heat as Bandrowski and Miller were accused of failing to pay participants what they were originally offered. (J Jackson was not an organizer nor a paid advertiser.)
Whitworth described the festival as a space to come as you are—an intimate gathering consisting primarily of Oregon-based, working-class LGBTQIA+ artists. He requested that details about the physical location not be published due to security concerns, but tickets are available online. “I find the films quite humanizing,” Liam wrote, “and I hope others feel that too.”
SEE IT: The Oregon Trans Film Festival at Deep Waters, 2710 N Interstate Ave., deepwaters.union.site. 5–9 pm Sunday, Feb. 15. Free, registration required.
