A timeline of transformation, compiled from 8 years' worth of photos by and of transgender actress and filmmaker Robyn Adams.
Social & External
The people behind it
Robyn Adams
Self
Timothy Farrell
Dr. Alton / Narrator (archival audio) (uncredited)
Lyle Talbot
Inspector Warren (archival audio) (uncredited)
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.
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.
Two legends contested their identities as women in the court of public opinion: April Ashley, who was immortalized as a trailblazer by embracing her transgender history; and Amanda Lear, who has consciously denied and obfuscated her history for decades. Their divergent paths reveal disparate but intertwined legacies.
In the latter half of 2025. Clenny Kwok films his life through one camera and multiple, multiple AAA batteries.
The poignant journey of a transgender actor unfolds, as twenty-three years after last performing on stage as a man, she makes her return in the iconic role of Aunt Eller in an LGBTQ+ production of the Rogers and Hammerstein classic Oklahoma! at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Edhi Alice: REVERSE begins from the perspective of Edhi, who is about to undergo gender confirmation surgery, and transitions into the journey of another protagonist, Alice, as she comes to terms with her body. The narrative of transition expands beyond a personal life story to encompass relationships, bodily experiences, and the sense of space, becoming a cinematic transformation.
Bambi Lake, a notorious San Francisco transgender performer and entertainer, takes us on a stroll down Polk Street, sharing anecdotes and the history behind her song Golden Age of Hustlers, which was written about her time as a street hustler in the mid-70’s.
Describing herself as a 'street queen,' Johnson was a legendary fixture in New York City’s gay ghetto and a tireless voice for LGBT pride since the days of Stonewall, who along with fellow trans icon Sylvia Rivera, founded Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.), a trans activist group based in the heart of NYC’s Greenwich Village. Her death in 1992 was declared a suicide by the NYPD, but friends never accepted that version of events. Structured as a whodunit, with activist Victoria Cruz cast as detective and audience surrogate, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson celebrates the lasting political legacy of Johnson, while seeking to finally solve the mystery of her unexplained death.
Al is a young drag king dealing with his transgender identity daily. He tries to express it through his shows and share with us his story, feeling and thoughts about it.
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.
In this film, Laerte conjugates the body in the feminine, and scrutinizes concepts and prejudices. Not in search of an identity, but in search of un-identities. Laerte creates and sends creatures to face reality in the fictional world of comic strips as a vanguard of the self. And, on the streets, the one who becomes the fiction of a real character. Laerte, of all the bodies, and of none, complicates all binaries. In following Laerte, this documentary chooses to clothe the nudity beyond the skin we inhabit.
A short documentary about wine, vulnerability, and queer experiences. It explores the effects of alcohol on intimate conversations and the tone of discourse between young adults, taking into account that this is a method of facilitation often used during social interactions.
When Will Ferrell's good friend Harper comes out as a trans woman, they take a road trip to bond and reintroduce Harper to the country as her true self.
Selfie is a pop culture in Hong Kong. Other than entertaining oneself, taking selfie can be an artistic work of personal photography. In general, people have negative feelings towards selfie, but it does carry alternative and in-depth meanings such as capture the moment and understanding oneself.
Trans women face extreme violence in Mexico City, and sex workers are even more vulnerable. This raw and deeply affecting portrait of Kenya gives an insider’s view of the impact that violence has on the community, and how complex life is for them. The film begins shortly after Kenya witnesses her friend Paola being murdered by a client. The film follows Kenya closely. Will the family accept burying Paola as she was: a flamboyant trans woman? Kenya approaches Paola’s loved ones with great respect and understanding—something she rarely experiences herself. When the murderer is released, she embarks on a lengthy battle for justice, backed up by her “sisters.”
Ricardo was once Sara, a homeless HIV positive transvestite, living in the underbelly of Manhattan. Today he is a churchgoing, married man, "saved" by a Dallas ministry. He has renounced his homosexuality, but is his conversion complete? Susana Aiken and Carlos Aparicio offer an intimate look at Ricardo's transformation.
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.
A documentary-essay which shows Costică Axinte's stunning collection of pictures depicting a Romanian small town in the thirties and forties. The narration, composed mostly from excerpts taken from the diary of a Jewish doctor from the same era, tells the rising of the antisemitism and eventually a harrowing depiction of the Romanian Holocaust.
Caught between societal expectations and family obligations, a closeted trans woman in China faces a harrowing choice: risk social abandonment by embracing her true self, or endure the mental strain of remaining invisible to stay safe.
An investigation of how Hollywood's fabled stories have deeply influenced how Americans feel about transgender people, and how transgender people have been taught to feel about themselves.
Told through performances, TV interviews, home movies, family photographs, private letters and unpublished memoirs, the film reveals the essence of an extraordinary woman who rose from humble beginnings in New York City to become a glamorous international superstar and one of the greatest artists of all time.
The world's greatest pin-up model and cult icon, Bettie Page, recounts the true story of how her free expression overcame government witch-hunts to help launch America's sexual revolution. When she saw the film The Notorious Bettie Page, produced by HBO in 2006, the main person concerned reacted unequivocally: “Lies! Lies!” In a long interview recorded shortly before her death, the woman who entered the collective unconscious as the ultimate pin-up gave her version of events to director Mark Mori. In a gravelly voice, Bettie Page tells her own story and lifts the veil on areas often hidden by images that have made so many men and women fantasize since the 1950s: her abused childhood, an eclipse that lasted forty years, her mental illness. Through testimonies and unpublished archives, this documentary brings back to life a body and a face endlessly declined before our eyes, just as Bettie wanted: “I would like people to remember me as I was in the photos.”
A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.
Director Michael Apted revisits the same group of British-born adults after a 7 year wait. The subjects are interviewed as to the changes that have occurred in their lives during the last seven years.
Amid shifting times, two women kept their decades-long love a secret. But coming out later in life comes with its own set of challenges.
BBC Arena's documentary on the Dames of British Theatre and film featuring Maggie Smith, Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench and Joan Plowright on screen together for the first time as they reminisce over a long summer weekend in a house Joan once shared with Sir Laurence Olivier.
The life of internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin is told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the overdose crisis.
The life and career of an actor, artist, and icon. His own journey through his own camera.
NUDE explores perceptions of nudity in art by chronicling the creative process of photographer David Bellemere as he's commissioned by NU Muses founder Steve Shaw to shoot a fine art calendar of nude photographs.
A cinematic odyssey featuring never-before-seen footage exploring David Bowie's creative and musical journey.
Vivian Maier's photos were seemingly destined for obscurity, lost among the clutter of the countless objects she'd collected throughout her life. Instead these images have shaken the world of street photography and irrevocably changed the life of the man who brought them to the public eye. This film brings to life the interesting turns and travails of the improbable saga of John Maloof's discovery of Vivian Maier, unravelling this mysterious tale through her documentary films, photographs, odd collections and personal accounts from the people that knew her. What started as a blog to show her work quickly became a viral sensation in the photography world. Photos destined for the trash heap now line gallery exhibitions, a forthcoming book and this documentary film.
As a visually radical memoir, CAMERAPERSON draws on the remarkable footage that filmmaker Kirsten Johnson has shot and reframes it in ways that illuminate moments and situations that have personally affected her. What emerges is an elegant meditation on the relationship between truth and the camera frame, as Johnson transforms scenes that have been presented on Festival screens as one kind of truth into another kind of story—one about personal journey, craft, and direct human connection.
Using the book 'Fragments', which collects Marilyn Monroe's poems, notes and letters, and with participation from the Arthur Miller and Truman Capote estates who have contributed more material, each of the actresses will embody the legend at various stages in her life.
Through deeply personal interviews with her siblings and an examination of the photographs, letters, and belongings left behind, Mariska assembles a new portrait of her mother Jayne Mansfield, an extraordinary and complex woman.
Drawn from a never before seen cache of personal footage spanning decades, this is an intimate portrait of the Sri Lankan artist and musician who continues to shatter conventions.
In 1977, a book of photographs captured an awakening - women shedding the cultural restrictions of their childhoods and embracing their full humanity. This documentary revisits those photos, those women and those times and takes aim at our culture today that alarmingly shows the need for continued change.
An impressionistic portrait of the iconic actor Harry Dean Stanton comprised of intimate moments, film clips from some of his 250 films and his renditions of American folk songs.
In an intimate and joyful story of love in the face of loss, celebrated poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley find strength—and unexpected hilarity—in what might be their final year together.
A documentary on legendary movie-poster artist Drew Struzan.