Despite being in one of the most conservative states in the country, the SXSW Film Festival has long-reflected a more progressive viewpoint through its documentary programming. It’s an interesting blend of docs at SXSW that can often be divided into three categories: quirky tales, pop culture stories, and movies with a message. This dispatch profiles three of the last category: Two character profiles that are also about trans acceptance and a piece about how the digital era is warping evolution.
Amy Jenkins’ “Adam’s Apple,” the best doc I’ve seen at this year’s SXSW, might be dismissed as little more than someone else’s home movies. This would be wrong. Not only is the assemblage of years of Jenkins’ personal filmmaking of her son Adam’s journey remarkably edited, but there’s a vulnerability here that shouldn’t be diminished by presuming this kind of display is remotely easy.
A deeply moving story of a family, “Adam’s Apple” is both a narrative of empowerment and one of ordinary parent-child dynamics. In many ways, it’s the latter that makes the former that much more powerful in that, yes, this is a story of a young man transitioning genders, but it’s also one of more universal issues of coming into adulthood like picking a college, dating someone new, and even your first car crash. It is an excellent piece of work that connects both as a story of supportive allyship through the eyes of a mother who just happens to be a filmmaker and as a reminder that trans kids go through many of the same road markers as cis ones.
“Adam’s Apple” is the story of a teenager becoming a trans man. Over eight years, Jenkins filmed her son Adam through ordinary and extraordinary moments, including hormone replacement therapy, an official name change, and surgeries. Adam Jenkins is a fascinating subject, someone who Amy is careful not to witness from afar but make part of the filmmaking journey, too. He often holds the camera and seems more like a collaborator than a subject. It’s not surprising to learn at the end that he’s majoring in Creative Writing.
Both Amy and Adam are careful not to turn his story into a scripted message movie, focusing on the reality of these formative years more than anything else. The result is a film that never sensationalizes the journey of a trans teenager, allowing Adam to serve as a role model just by being who he is. He’s also so remarkably eloquent. In one of the film’s most casually powerful moments, Adam’s father tries to thread a needle by noting how he’s happy to know Adam but misses the daughter he used to have. Adam points out that he still has the same child he always did and says, “I don’t want to be seen as a lost daughter.” It’s a simple yet remarkably insightful statement. The film is full of them.
“Adam’s Apple” also becomes a document of parenthood and growth that’s often not about being young and trans as much as it is the universal blend of pride and grief that comes with saying goodbye to a child. It may have hit me harder as someone with a son currently applying for colleges, but I think anyone could find truth in this emotionally raw piece of work as a reminder that we shouldn’t “other” trans kids not just in sports but in every walk of young life. Jenkins has a line early in the film as she’s filming a caterpillar develop a chrysalis: “I love watching time unfold.” Time is both a blessing and a curse to parents. “Adam’s Apple” is a reminder to embrace both.
A more in-your-face approach to trans issues works well for Luchina Fisher’s “The Dads,” an expansion of her Emmy-winning Netflix short of the same name (to a work that’s still remarkably brief at 72 minutes). While making a film about a group for dads of trans children, Trump 2.0 was inflicted on the world, changing the temperature of the project entirely. What clearly started as a project designed just to listen to men talk about overcoming their own biases to support their trans children became a document of a country moving backward.
These men end up not just having to vocally support their kids but fight for them in courts, and some of them even end up leaving the country because of their fear over what it means to be trans in the United States in the 2020s. It makes for a film that sometimes feels like it’s trying to tell too many stories in its very brief runtime, but it’s still a passionate reminder that it’s increasingly difficult out there to be trans, or even just to be someone who loves a trans person.
Subjects in “The Dads” include men like Stephen Chukumba, a widowed father of four whose trans son Hobbes is heading off to college, and Ed Diaz, a Texan father of a younger trans child who faces the tough decision of fleeing the country to protect them. These men are vulnerable and honest in front of Fisher’s camera, telling their stories but also revealing their fears as the world changes radically in November 2024.
Once again, we hear stories of the prosecution of trans people in this country, but films like “The Dads” put human faces on statistics, legal rulings, and headlines. Again, it sometimes feels like it’s trying to do too much in 70 minutes; there’s a version that really spends time at the Dads Retreat in June 2024, which this movie feels like it rushes through to get to the election a few months later. Seeing the men and their children speak in June 2024 about their hope for the future when the Democrats are re-elected to the White House has a bitter poignancy. What could have been.
Finally, there’s Sara Robin’s “Your Attention Please,” another documentary about people trying to protect our children in a world where their safety seems like an increasingly lowered priority every day. As a parent of three teenagers who has had to navigate the impact of social media, there are issues raised by Robin’s film that need to be a greater part of the national conversation.
As a film, Robin makes some frustrating choices like losing focus, repeating talking points, and cherry-picking ways to reflect social media or nostalgia for a time that never really existed—body image issues weren’t invented by the internet; amplified to be sure, but the opening scenes of “YAP” long for a time that either didn’t really exist or still does in pieces today. The narrator speaks of a time when kids randomly met up on the weekend like everyone is sitting alone on their phones now. As a dad, I can personally attest that a lot of this isn’t as black and white as this movie wants it to be. Benefits like access for the physically or socially disabled, representation, connection, and knowledge are waved away by the panic around social media.
Having said all of that, the panic is righteous, especially that of the inspiring Kristin Bride, who advocates for legal restrictions on social media after the suicide of her son, who was cyberbullied. The truth is that there’s a generation that sadly got lost in the development of social media. Kids now are taught about the dangers of technology in a way that they should have been from the beginning; my son’s high school has stricter phone polices like one captured in the film, and it’s worked out as well as it does here. People like Bride and the groundbreaking Trisha Prahbu will make sure future generations don’t fall into the social media trap that swallowed too many of the last one. Prahbu founded a company called ReThink, which quite literally just asks teens “you sure?” when they’re about to post something cruel. Stunningly, 93% of teens delete the bullying comment. The truth is that we know the difference between right and wrong, but devices enable us to forget. That’s one of the film’s most fascinating insights.
Most of all, the testimonials from parents in “Your Attention Please” are heartbreaking. It can be so moving when it focuses on them that the frustrations I have with the filmmaking elsewhere fall away. As Vivek Murphy says in the film, “We have not had enough conversation about [the impact of social media on youth] as a society.” That’s undeniably true. And this film will help with that. And how can anyone listen to Kristin Bride and not want to cheer her on? She deserves ALL of our attention.
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