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Full Spectrum Features
MamSir Productions
Colour
16mm
digital
English/English
English/English
English/English
English/English
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Two shirtless people stand in front of each other and stare intently at one another. The person on the right has light skin and short brown hair with the sides faded. They are touching the chest of the person on the left with their left hand. The person on the left has light skin with a beard and a hairy chest wearing a thin gold necklace.
A person is in the center with a blank stare in front of a white background with text message conversation on either side. The text on the right in blue reads "I love ftm guys'' with a response on the other side in yellow saying "ok." The blue responds with "can i see it?" The yellow side then says "no". The person in the center has light skin and short red hair with brown buzzed sides. They have light hazel eyes and stubble on their face. They are wearing a dark red zip up jacket and navy blue and dark green flannel underneath.
An underground narrative has long been whispered among transgender men: after coming out as trans, many of us develop an attraction for other men. In this hybrid documentary, history comes alive when an Iranian-American transman time-travels on a dizzying quest to unravel his own sexual desires. As Ahmad approaches age 60, his long-suppressed desires for other men become impossible to ignore. Having grown up in an era when homosexual activity could block one’s access to medical transition, he can’t help but wonder whether his sexuality and gender identity are completely at odds. He turns to the LGBT archives for answers, where he meets a 20-something trans archivist named Kieran. As Ahmad falls deeper into the archive, he is quite literally sucked into the text—becoming a time-traveler who participates in the queer cruising history he reads about. This fictional narrative is interwoven with archival gems and a trove of contemporary oral histories from a diverse group of transmen across North America. These participants candidly discuss the evolution of their desires and illuminate their struggles with gender (non)conformity, fetishization, transphobia, sexual racism, and safer sex. Desire Lines pushes against binaries—fiction vs. non-fiction, reality vs. fantasy, public vs. private—in order to highlight the fallacy of “purity” that undergirds colonialist notions of discrete categories of being (or genre); embracing bewilderment as a liberatory strategy for trans representation.
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