America in Transition (AIT) is the award-winning, Sundance-backed, documentary series that explores the community, family, and social issues of Transgender people of color across the US.
This film captures real life individuals from a veteran turned activist, an immigrant seeking home, a woman living with HIV healing from trauma, and a model navigating family life.
Transgender Filmmaker André Pérez, founded the Trans Oral History Project in 2008 motivated by the isolation and discrimination that he felt growing up in a military family in Virginia. Pérez journeyed across the country to document each person’s story in depth, tackling intersectional issues such as HIV criminalization, living as trans in the South, family acceptance, trans exclusion from the military, and immigrant detention.
Pérez’s America In Transition (AIT) was initially inspired by his own experience coming of age in North Carolina and starting his transition as a youth in rural Vermont. He notes how, “I had questions about everything from health care access to navigating relationships, but I had no one to ask. Without role models or institutional support, I felt like I had to come to the city to find myself.” This is how he discovered Trans Oral History Project. Over the past seven years, Pérez interviewed trans folks across the country who express parallel stories of being told trans didn’t fit with other aspects of their personhood. How can you be trans and Muslim or black or Mexican or Southern? How one would find ways to reconcile the seemingly disparate parts of who they were.
“2015 was heralded as the “transgender tipping point,” but 2016 has brought some of the most regressive civil rights legislation in modern US history. Trans people have become the targets of radical social conservatives who are leveraging fear and ignorance to create a social climate of increasing and unrelenting hostility. We are caught in a culture war, as Southern lawmakers fight the federal government in order to protect the supposed “right” for businesses (MS and NC), schools (TX), and even health professionals (TN and TX) to discriminate against transgender people. AIT uses character-driven storytelling in order to highlight issues of importance to trans people in marginalized communities.
At its heart, AIT is about how environments shape who we are. It will complicate notions of social change in underrepresented communities. This is a crucial moment to help people understand how trans realities differ based on identity, geography, and social context. The world is changing for the white, upper-middle class people we see on mainstream television, but trans people of color, immigrants, and working class families face a different world. AIT focuses on relationships as it explores where, when, and how change happens in a complex individual, a diverse community, and a divided nation.” (Says Pérez in a press release from REVRY.tv)
Please see the trailer below and the series will premier March 29th just before Trans Visibility Day on March 31st.
Go to REVRY.tv for additional information about this and other available Queer content.
