04/07/2024 - Conceptual artist Victoria Verseau does not hold back in her feature debut, documenting a return to memories, grief and the process of transition all at once

Swedish artist and filmmaker Victoria Verseau opens her poem of a film, Trans Memoria [+see also:
trailer
film profile], with a close-up of small, semi-transparent objects that are indistinguishable at first. Plastic wrappers, used condoms, white earphones and their cord, a bone: all these remnants of a life lived illuminate the screen with their presence, but their meaning remains hidden.

“I collect, I document, I write down my memories, afraid they’ll disappear,” Verseau confesses in a voiceover as ghostly as the worn and torn items. With a radically open and personal project like this one, Verseau already stands out as a director to watch while her aesthetic and ethical commitment to cinema has led to Trans Memoria having its world premiere in Karlovy Vary’s Proxima Competition.

In her feature debut, the director returns to Thailand, where, in 2012, she underwent gender-affirming surgery. An undisclosed location has never felt so personal to an unsuspecting viewer: a hospital, a hotel room, a desolate beach that has nothing to do with the picture-postcard images of Thailand one may be used to seeing. Even more, that place exists in Trans Memoria as many things all at once: a time capsule, a memory box, a diorama and a taxidermy version of what that past must have felt like, when Verseau woke up from her surgery and filmed herself, barely conscious. When remembering the post-op days, months and years, the filmmaker often describes the presence of Meril – her close friend who went through surgery and transition at the same time – as both angelic and ghostly. Angelic because Meril saved her by sharing this path, and ghostly because Meril eventually committed suicide.

Duality and ambivalence are key for Trans Memoria and for the myriad individual trans experiences to which the film pays tribute. It is certainly the first documentary by a trans creator that decisively veers away from all of the traditional narrative arcs – such as seeing transition as an end goal and a happy ending, or focusing on the pain and struggle as not only justified, but necessary – and purposefully comments on them. There are a few charged sequences where Verseau’s friends Athena and Ameena (who are at an earlier stage of their transitions) unapologetically share their input and challenge the director, in terms of both her filmmaking and her personal disposition. The inclusion of such scenes speaks to the film’s commitment to embracing the multiplicity of viewpoints and lived experiences, also on the topic of death and suicide. Trans Memoria is not just a personal film; it is a precious gift.

Returning is not easy, revisiting a memory clashes with reality, and the erasure that comes with repetition is deeply felt, both on the surface of the screen and in the emotional impact of the scenes themselves. Verseau incorporates lower-res videos of her own video diary alongside the tableaux of the present, the shakiness of the former complementing the calm and collected melancholy embedded in the long takes of peopleless places. That nameless hotel in Thailand is the same and isn’t at the same time: the film manages to convey that superimposition remarkably well without resorting to tricks or explanations. It’s Verseau’s raw, confessionary voiceover that is not only heard, but also felt in each image that DoP Daniel Takács offers us. By chipping away at bigger, hopeful, truthful answers to questions of womanhood, or the freedom to live and die (amongst many others), Trans Memoria showcases at once a yearning for what’s irreversibly lost and the dream that perhaps it is not, after all, truly gone forever.

Trans Memoria was produced by Stockholm-based HER Film in co-production with French company Les Films du Bilboquet. Outplay Films handles the documentary’s world sales.