Gender identity gets starring role at Venice Film Festival

Transgender issues have taken centre stage at the Venice Film Festival this year, with Italian director Emanuele Crialese even using the platform to reveal he was born a woman as he presented his new film starring Penelope Cruz.

The revelation by Crialese came at a press conference for his new film, L'Immensita, which is inspired by his difficult adolescence. “It is inspired by my childhood and my own story,” said Crialese, whose last film, Terraferma, won the Special Jury Price at Venice in 2011.

“I was born biologically a woman, but that does not mean that I don’t have in me a huge part (that is a) female character. That is probably the best part of me,” he said, speaking publicly for the first time about his transition.

“At a certain point, I had to make a choice... of whether to live or to die. You don’t choose to make that sort of journey. You are born that way,” he added. He did not give any details of his transition but said that as in his often tender film, he relied on his mother for support and recognised the anxiety it caused her.

In the Italian-language movie, Cruz’s initially exuberant character buckles under the weight of her overbearing husband and a troubled trio of children, all of whom carry the scars of living in an unhappy household. It is not alone at this year's festival in embracing artists who reject traditional gender roles or tackle issues around sexual identity.

Cruz, who won the best actress award in Venice last year for Parallel Mothers, said her character finds herself caught in a situation from which there was no escape. “There are many women around the world trapped in their own homes, trying to pretend in front of their children that nothing is as bad as it looks. It is just (done) out of survival. I know some of them, terrible, horrible stories,” she told reporters.

L’Immensita is the latest in a long line of films where Cruz has played a mother, a role she said she had felt drawn to from a young age in her native Spain. “(I had) a very strong maternal instinct since I was a five-year-old girl who was telling everybody in the park my plan was becoming a mother as soon as possible,” she said.

Another film in the main competition, Monica by Italian director Andrea Pallaoro, stars a transgender actor in the leading role - a first in 79 editions of the festival. Trace Lysette, known for her role in the Amazon Prime series Transparent, plays a transgender woman who returns to Ohio after a long absence to care for her dying mother.

"It's very rare that you see a script where there's a trans character at the centre and the movie is told through her lens," Lysette told reporters. "Usually trans characters are more a sidebar vehicle for someone else's story."

Besides exploring the title character's emotional and psychological world, the movie reflects on "the precarious nature of each of our identities when faced with the need to survive and transform", said Pallaoro.

Struggling for decades

Themes of gender identity are also the subject of various documentaries at the festival. In All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, director Laura Poitras centres on the art and activism of US photographer Nan Goldin, whose early work focused on gay culture and volatile male-female relationships.

One of the breakout performances has been Quintessa Swindell, a non-binary actor, who stars alongside Sigourney Weaver and Joel Edgerton in Master Gardener, playing out of competition.

Meanwhile, a documentary by French director Sebastien Lifshitz, Casa Susanna, recounts the story of a clandestine community of cross-dressers in conservative America in the 1950s and 1960s, relying on archival footage and surviving members of this "pre-queer" history. "It's been a struggle for decades to try to break out of the archetypes," Lifshitz told AFP.

Another French director, Florent Gouelou, presented Three Nights a Week, a film he described as "a declaration of love" to the art form of drag. In the film, Baptiste, a man in a relationship with a woman, discovers the Parisian world of drag queens and falls in love with one of them, Cookie.

"Through the character of Baptiste you see my own fascination and through the character of Cookie, you see my own experience as a drag queen," said Gouelou. 

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