The first edition of the Trans Image / Trans Experience Festival (TITE) in Dublin showcases the multitudes contained in the trans community while providing a vital sense of safety at a time of societal hostility.
Dublin’s Smithfield Plaza is a wide, cobbled expanse lined by bright cafes, block-colour signs, and tall, thin lampposts like metal flamingos. Most days it looks like a university campus in a dream, but on the Sunday of the inaugural Trans Image / Trans Experience Festival (TITE), a sunny morning in late April, I arrived to find the square full of horses. Each month, a group made up mostly of Irish Travellers arrives to continue the centuries-old tradition of Smithfield Horse Fairs, against the will of the Gardaí, developers and residents. Local animal charities are concerned about the horses’ welfare on the cobbles, but the city says it doesn’t have the funds to relocate the fair. And the Travellers – who are forcibly excluded from many jobs, houses and public services in Ireland – are not willing to give up another element of their public life.
It was a fitting context for Ireland’s first trans and nonbinary film festival. Underneath the plaza, across two-and-a-bit days and two screens of the Light House Cinema, the fight to maintain minoritised public life was a constant topic of both art and conversation. Panellists continually discussed the scarcity of Arts Council funding for trans filmmakers, and the state of Irish trans healthcare (bad); the UK Supreme Court judgment about ‘biological sex’, passed the previous week, and Trump’s anti-trans crusade in the US were on everyone’s minds. Yet the mood wasn’t bleak. Having this enclave of transness and trans film available, for two-and-a-bit days on the Light House mezzanine, felt like a miracle. Attendees were open, friendly, relieved. The sense of being sheltered from hostile scrutiny was palpable.
When gifted a new context, you’re allowed to think more about what you want. One of TITE’s stated aims was “to shift the focus of trans film from representation to craft”: the festival programme was saturated with representation, forcing a change in rubric. The load-bearing figure of the singular trans character, and their burden to ethically and accurately speak to universal transness, was replaced with a dazzling polyphony of trans characters and images. It felt strange to scroll Letterboxd reviews of Toronto-based feature Soft, a brutal yet gorgeous ‘love letter to queer childhood’, and see how many people were taking issue with its portrayals of adolescent sexuality and petty crime, worrying that it makes queer communities ‘look bad’. That scarcity mentality felt like it came from somewhere a million miles away.
Instead, TITE managed to craft a feeling of intense abundance under restrictive circumstances, from the colourful zine and art stalls in the waiting area to the sheer breadth of the programme (40 shorts, 8 features, 13 countries). It was, admittedly, hard to find much time to decompress or process within the festival’s tight schedule, which at times left barely five minutes between screenings. I joined a group who were trying to catch all 11 shows, but I tapped out at nine, ruefully skipping a 10th to split artisanal pizzas around the corner with a table of filmmakers and volunteers. (Not to validate stereotypes, but all the best things I ate in Dublin involved some combination of potato and bread. The potato-pancetta pizza at Bonobo was no exception.)
The festival wasn’t enclosing for everyone, but it was for me. I didn’t see the museums or castles; I only saw the River Liffey, which bisects the city centre like a wire through bread, on the ways out and in. Dublin, for me, was a blur of grey cobblestones and faces, something friendly but kept out of reach – perhaps fitting for a city seized by a vicious housing crisis. But I don’t regret giving the city up to try to see everything; for someone like me, who hasn’t seen much trans filmmaking beyond the sliver that makes it to wide release, TITE was essentially a crash course in ‘the scene.’ It was also a noticeably high-quality low-filler programme, regardless of the early-career status of many of its filmmakers.
One recurring thread in the festival was a trans interrogation of the pressure to be likeable, sympathetic, fundable. “I wanted to tap into the worst possible version of myself, about what I imagine myself to be when I’m catastrophising, and to try to have empathy for that person,” noted director Liadán Roche in a Q&A. Several other directors and actors picked up on that theme of exploiting catastrophisation, both for the purpose of comedy (as in improvised comedy feature Dog Movie, about a passive-aggressive couple and their cheerfully incompetent lodger) and of horror (as in the housing horror short Stagmite, or the rattlingly bleak rape-revenge short Glory, Hole). Dog Movie’s Bloo is a hilariously infuriating housemate, but the film ends on a sequence that is a sincere, affectionate paean to their nomadic, non-goal-oriented way of life; Roche’s short, Terratoma, also ends on a moment of peace for its traumatised main character, reaching beyond the harm she has done and the bad art she has made.
Alongside that exploration of ‘trans experience’, the festival showcased a lot of formal innovation about what constitutes a ‘trans image’ – from hypersaturated animated battles to stop-motion possession horror – and about working with limited resources. The most compelling experiments in the programme included True Receiver, a handpainted 16mm film work I described to a friend as resembling an ‘angry kaleidoscope’, and Dragking Highway, a ‘DIY digital road movie’ about transfeminine hitchhiking combining audio conversations with disorientating 3D renderings of roads, streets and gas stations. There was also a notable specialism in low-budget/DIY genre comedies, such as house favourite short 7G: The Fight Against Phones and rollicking midnight feature Spirit Riser, which includes a sidesplittingly funny and engaging car chase where the cars are very obviously not moving. (Spirit Riser also features Patti Harrison as a homicidally incompetent babysitter and Kate Bornstein as God; never have I been so grateful that trans people tend to know each other.)
I expected TITE, in its prioritisation of trans-made and trans-crewed film, to potentially be reliant on North American fare, but it was pleasing to see strong offerings from Norway, South Korea, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands and India. Potentially the best short in the whole programme was Bonita Rajpurohit’s iykyk (if you know you know), a luminous, offbeat, and excruciating take on trans-cis dating. There’s a scene where main character Kusum and her date are painting each other with body paint, and he makes an off-colour comment, and Kusum’s face – in tight focus against a blur of pale wall – changes. In the centre of the frame is the neon smear of finger paint on her cheek, a quickly failing suggestion of intimacy and understanding. It breaks your heart.
Yet the festival was also defined by its local and communal flavour, and by the collaborations of trans filmmakers, actors and crew in the UK and Ireland banding together in response to their delegitimization in the wider industry. Despite feeling like an enclave/haven, the festival was unusually well-anchored in the local community and its needs, with pre-film presentations from Ireland’s Queer Asian Pride network and from CATU, Ireland’s pre-eminent tenants union. Recognising trans concerns around housing, healthcare, and community support was built into the festival structure. I got a sense that being able to give yourself over to film, for the TITE team, was aided by your bodily and social needs being recognised and held.
I think what touched me most, alongside the most intimate films in the roster, was seeing the organisers and volunteers at work: sprawled on sofas half-asleep as the midnight showing on Saturday drew to a close; excitedly discussing the prospective awards list in the café on Sunday morning; standing around a little bemused at the end of the festival, having clearly not thought ahead to what they were going to do afterwards. After the cinema closed, I joined five other attendees in an Airbnb overlooking the tramline, and we talked, without stopping, until 4:30AM. Several people have already offered to organise the afterparty for next year.
