In a darkened room, a young woman’s body lays on a medical table awaiting to be washed before burial. Her father comes in and stands at her head and caresses her hair. This is one of the final moments he will spend with her before he says goodbye. When his wife joins him, they soon discover that because their daughter is transgender and they are a Muslim household, they will struggle to find someone to properly wash her body. Ahmad Alysaseer’s Our Males and Females is bold, moving, and an essential film to rally for trans rights.
Because the emotions run so high, Alysaseer chose to strip down the story. There aren’t a lot of characters and we mostly stay in the same place for the entire film. The simplicity lets the story speak for itself.
“When my sister and I wrote the film, we took into consideration that the shorter the film is, the harder it will be for the audience to become attached to it,” Alysaseer says. “If we had a lot of locations and a lot of characters, there wouldn’t be enough time for the audience to engage. That was one of the challenges that we imposed on ourselves. We wanted it to be told in real time. We wanted to make everything minimal to focus on the characters and their arcs.”
We don’t get all the details about how this woman met her end, but Alysaseer is saving that expansion for a feature film adaptation. For this short, we learn that this mother and father “got her body back from abroad.” Alysaseer’s choice not to expand on what happened forces us to stay in the moment and never lose sight of the decisions this mother and father have to make. He also illuminates us on some of the approvals a trans person has to get in order to begin their gender affirmation.
“We had the story in our heads way before we started writing the script out,” he says. “Her father is a doctor, and that’s pretty obvious from what happens in film. She got the legal approval to transition, and, in the Middle East, that’s very crucial. You can’t really have the operations without two approvals, and a lot of people don’t know what. The first is a legal approval from the court and the other is basically the religious court in the country. In the scene where the female washer storms out, the mother says, ‘You are not a mufti, and we got approval.’ The parents got both approvals, but that’s not the point. We want to dig into that in the feature. We wanted to hint that getting those approvals in the outer region is really not easy.
“Despite having that, you will still face difficulties like, for instance, the inspiration for our film. She got both approvals, but they never changed her papers. Whenever she gets pulled over and she shows her ID, it still says male and they think she will get brought in under the suspicion of identity theft. When she told us about this, she asked us, ‘You think the operation is the end of all of this? You think you know exactly where you belong when your operation is over?’ Discrimination persists, and when we looked into similar stories of the same regions, we realized that long after you die, you will still try to approve yourself. We wanted our audience to feel empathy with a dead body.”
Alysaseer plays with lights and darks in the cinematography to such commanding effect that we begin to wonder if this married coupled are still on the same page as their situation becomes more and more dire. In one shot, the father is smoking outside on one side of a fence while his wife silently sits on the other.
“The parents are afraid of scandal,” Alysaseer explains. “Especially towards the beginning of the film, the father has no light sources from the windows, but when the mother is in the shot, the window is always behind her. We wanted to reflect their choices even before they make them. There is always light behind this young girl’s mother, because, deep down, she supports her daughter’s decisions. The father is always blocked, and he always considers his daughter to be male. We also played with the camera movement. We tried, as much as possible, to do things that reflected the emotional needs of the characters, especially the dead body. You might see some frames where we crop her body at her breasts, because her whole journey is about the parts of her body. In the opening scene, I cropped the scene at their necks to hint at their suffocation.”
This young woman cannot speak or fight for herself. In the last few moments of the film, her father goes to his car and retrieves a scalpel. There is immense tension but also overwhelming sadness when we realize what he has done. It is one of the most fraught moments of any film this year–feature or short.
“He’s violating her and her rights,” he says plainly. “That’s a reflection of what, I think, transgender people feel while they are alive. This was the hardest moment to shoot. It didn’t take us too long to write it as much as it took to develop it and really put care into this story. For the ending, we were lost. What would be a proper ending for this young woman? What would make you think and leave you awestruck? My sister came up with the ending, and she thought it was crazy. When she told me, I was blown away–it felt right.
“It was very emotional for the crew. We played the music when we shot the scene, so the actor playing the father was in sync with the music. Everyone on the crew was looking at the monitor, and we could feel his emotions. This man is very determined, but he is clearly not happy at his choice. A lot of us cried, and we felt the heaviness. I told the actor playing [the father] that I wanted his character to feel shame. Shame as a father, but, at the same time, for his daughter. He failed her. The societal pressure is weighing on him too.”
When the father’s action are done, we hear his wife performing a prayer. For a lot of people unfamiliar with some Muslim prayers the words sound like a promise or a regret. She says. “Give her an abode better than her home and a family better than hers,” and we realize that she is using the correct pronouns for her daughter. It is a moment Alysaseer knew he should end on.
“It’s the official prayer that we say in Muslim prayers, so it’s very well known to those people,” he says. “It does end with this, and it felt like it fit perfectly with the statement that we want to make. There was a different ending originally. You would hear the mother’s line but then the father came out and you see him call a male washer to request he come and wash his son’s body but his body is deformed. We shot it, but we decided that we didn’t want to leave the audience with that. This girl wants a better family than hers. It’s not about him deforming her breasts. She deserved a better family.”
