I AM HER
I completed "I am Her" in 2019 as a way of processing ascriptions of Femmeness, as a lament and a rant about notions of femininity.
The film can be described as experimental, non-narrative, with abstract characters and an uncanny mood.
The intro is a three-minute lamento of a rose that invokes western forms of idealized femininity.
At the time, it was particularly important to me (and still is) to look for sharper framings of feminism, those which regarded transfemininities, transmasculinities, non-binary gender understandings and femmeness as inherent to anti-misogynist strategies and analysis.
Locating myself as non-binary and having enjoyed playing with code-switching between being femme and butch, I was addressing a pain that I was beginning to both structurally analyze and emotionally process during the making of this project. A kind of pain and anger that sets in before one might either fall and be defeated or find a way, rebuild and re-formate oneself. My character stands in front of a portal in an abandoned filmstudio.
I wish for it be a portal to solidarity, care, a portal to shared knowledge, structures and resources while at the same time being able to allow uncertainty and vulnerability. I think I wanted to show the moment before breaching out, before finding or not finding.
My idea was to create a muse, a Brechtian character that marks being grand, mysterious, and powerful on their own terms, yet finding themself in front of a portal right before the moment when things could change, right before the moment of upheaval.