‘Merry Christmas, Bitch.’
And so, this year’s must-see festive comedy begins.
It’s the opening scene. In it we can see two girls, bitching about a guy, sharing a cupcake. So far, so unsurprising right?
Wrong. On the left is Alexandra, a transgender sex worker. On the right is her best friend Sin-Dee Rella, who’s just left prison to find out her boyfriend (a drug dealing pimp called Chester) has been cheating on her. For the next 88 minutes we’ll watch Sin-Dee wreaking havoc around West Hollywood, determined to find the girl he cheated on her with. And when she finds her, she’s going to ‘Chris Brown the bitch.’ This is Tangerine, and it’s like no film you’ve ever seen before.
Your soon-to-be favourite female led comedy is a game changer for two reasons: first, it stars transgender people acting as transgender people (more on that later) and secondly, it was shot entirely on an iPhone 5s. Think what you can do with that thing in your pocket.
Tangerine has been released at a poignant moment. Popular discourse surrounding gender is in a state of flux. There’s never been a better time to be transgender, with people like Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox opening our eyes to issues we might have never previously paid much thought to. There’s also never been a worse time to be transgender, statistically. This year in the US violence against transgender women has increased by 13% and 27 transgender people have been murdered – a record high. Women of colour make up a majority of those numbers.
Notably, director Sean Baker doesn’t focus his iPhone camera solely on these miserable narratives. Instead he’s made a film that celebrates human resilience and friendship; something we can all relate to. As we chase Alexandra and Sin-Dee round West Hollywood, sleazy men come (literally) and go. The pair have altercations with the police. There are drugs.
But this isn’t a film about transgender sex workers and the shit they put up with, this is a film about the strength of friendship. ‘Everything else just happened to be there’ Mya Taylor, who plays Alexandra tells us when we speak to her. 'They just happened to be sex workers. They just happened to have been cheated on.’ And it’s a rare film that captures that friendship so perfectly. File next to: Thelma & Louise and The Banger Sisters.
While we’re on the topic of leading ladies, let’s talk about representation and inequality in Hollywood. In 86 years, only four women have been nominated for a Best Director Oscar, and only one (Kathryn Bigelow) has won. And I don’t need to mention J-Law’s recent Lenny Letter article. Everyone apart from white men are grossly undervalued and underrepresented in the film industry, but the tides are changing and the fat cats in the studios can’t move fast enough to keep up with filmmakers like Sean. ‘Chris [Bergoch, Tangerine’s writer] and I are just white men from outside that [transgender] world, so we can’t just jump in there and dictate a script or plot.' He tells us. 'I think that we need more voices in cinema and more diverse voices. We need more women writers and directors, trans people, people from different backgrounds, racial and economic backgrounds.’ Men sitting around sprawling LA offices ticking off quotas isn’t going to do it. This change will, like all real change, come from the ground up. Tangerine’s distributors Magnolia Pictures are even running a campaign to create an Oscar for transgender actors, with Mya and co-star Kitana Kiki Rodriguez at the forefront. The battle is underway.
Of course, films about transgender people are nothing new. What IS new however is transgender people being played by transgender people. Revolutionary, huh? Sean and partner Chris Bergoch didn’t do a casting call, they started their search for actors in a West Hollywood LGBQT community centre. It’s here that they came across Mya and Kitana, two best friends with no acting experience – and bleak employment prospects.‘If you’re writing a role for a trans person in 2015,’ Sean rationalises, ‘Why not cast a trans person? I think that has already sent some sort of message. We’re sending a message to the studios that it’s time to step up and do it: with your bigger budgets and your higher profile projects.’
Put it this way: in the past few years, Jared Leto has been cast as a transgender woman in Dallas Buyer’s Club, Eddy Redmayne in The Danish Girl... it all raises the question of representation. Mind you, with a slew of new programs from the ever on point Channel 4 (Sex Diaries: Trans Lovers, Girls To Men) you’d be forgiven for forgetting that trans people haven’t always been this well represented in the TV and film industries.
But then you’d also be forgetting: the Caitlyn Jenner Effect. Love her or hate her (don’t be a hater) it’s hard to overexaggerate the impact a world famous sportsman-turned-reality TV star transitioning in the glare of the media spotlight has had on the world. Sean and Mya are of course big fans. ‘She’s got people who have never even thought about this subject before being able to understand it’ says Sean. ‘And that will open the door to many other stories.’
Mya agrees and reminds me, with a knowing smile, that there are three important figures in the transgender world right now: Caitlyn Jenner, Laverne Cox and… Mya Taylor.
If she gets that first transgender Oscar, she might just be right.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.