Frameline is thrilled to partner with guest bloggers from the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire during this year's festival! We've invited students from the LGBTQA Studies: San Francisco Travel Seminar at UWEC to share their experiences of Frameline and their thoughts on San Francisco's queer community. As they attend Frameline and experience San Francisco, they will be creating LGBTQ-themed documentaries, as well as vetting films for their second Eau Queer Film Festival in the fall. For more information about the contributors, click here.
I just knew that I would love Becoming Chaz. Maybe it had something to do with the hype, maybe I’m partial to documentaries, or maybe I just like learning about transgender as an identity. Either way, the film was absolutely fantabulous! It far exceeded my expectations. I actually didn’t take any notes during the film because I was so enthralled. I didn’t want to take the risk of possibly missing something important. One thing I admired about the production of this was the rawness. The producers and/or directors didn’t go back and try to make the story perfect or more eloquent. They just let the story flow.
Something that pestered me through the story was pretty much every time Cher was talking. It wasn’t because I despise her, but the fact that she kept using the pronoun “she.” Chaz is not a female any longer and for Cher to keep using the term I became a little annoyed. It’s almost as though Chaz’s mom didn’t want Chaz to be Chaz. During the very last interview of the film Chaz and Jenny are contrasting perfectly. Chaz wearing black paired with a white background and Jenny wearing white paired with a black background. It just looked really cool in my opinion. Through the development of the film I found myself falling in love with Jenny because of her care and support of Chaz. -- Katie Johnson
I’d say that when I walked into the Castro Theatre tonight, I had pretty high expectations for Becoming Chaz. I had just seen an amazing documentary and I was excited to see another one- this time about a trans individual. Unfortunately, the film didn’t live up to my expectations.
First of all, it jumped right into Chaz’s transition process, with literally no history. That’s not to say that the back-story didn’t come out- but it took a long time. It seemed to me to jump around a lot that and that made itdifficult to follow. Also, the film was more about the process of transitioning and I was expecting more of a personal narrative into Chaz’s feelings and his internal processes as he came to understand and accept his identity as a trans man.
Something I really liked about this film was how the stories and experiences of both Jenny and Chaz were told. It was not simply a story about Chaz’s transition because it included Jenny’s perspective and the issues she was dealing with. To me that really showed how much Chaz values Jenny and the relationship that they have, and that he (and the filmmakers) realizes that such a process doesn’t affect only the person going under the knife. -- Katy Cobb
The part I was most interested in wasn’t Chaz, himself. It was the reactions of his long time partner, Jenny, and his mother, Cher.
The transition hit Jenny especially hard. She was very supportive of Chaz and knew this was something he needed to do. But Jenny hadn’t been with a man in many years, since she was 21. Not only is her partner changing his body to make him a man, but also she’s struggling with her feelings on whether or not she wants to be with a man. She loves Chaz and that’s very apparent. But as the hormones start to impact his body more and more, Jenny wonders where the Chaz she first met went.
Chaz, himself, says that sometime the testosterone just takes over. He’d be yelling at Jenny about a sweater she was wearing cause he didn’t like it and though he didn’t mean to be yelling or act like such an asshole, he just couldn’t stop himself. It put a lot of strain on their relationship and, at one point; Jenny was sleeping in the guest room.
I wish there had been more about the relationship dynamic and how they got through Chaz’s transition together, because that’s something we don’t really see with people going through such a transition. What about the loved ones? Not just the family, but the lesbian girlfriend or gay boyfriend who needs to alter their perspective and see if this person is still the person they are in love with.
The production and cinematography were absolutely wonderful, very clean and neat. Finding out it was Chaz who contacted them and asked the director to document his transition was startling to me. --Liz Albert