What is ‘Trans New Weird’? An Emerging Film Genre Screens at YBCA

There’s something happening in trans cinema right now. It’s playful, messy, campy and decidedly raw. Film programmers Gabi Grossman and Aidan Dick, both of Frameline, have coined the phrase “Trans New Weird” to describe this emerging genre coming from mostly trans directors.

“These films are extraordinarily playful,” Grossman says. “They’re also a reaction against the demand in certain more mainstream films for trans people to be ‘normal,’ whatever that means.”

She puts it another way: “They keep the weird in queer.”

To introduce this “new wave” of filmmaking to even more audiences, Grossman and Dick have now programmed a series of double features at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Spread across three months, New Queer Cinema x Trans New Weird pairs ’90s independent films with contemporary, thematic counterparts.

“It was important to give context and to showcase that nothing exists in a vacuum, right?” Grossman says. “Queer and trans artists have always been dreaming up new ways to demand dignity and equal rights.”

First up on the schedule is “Who Owns Our Image,” featuring Todd Haynes’ Poison (1991) and Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker (2022). The movies will play back to back on Saturday, April 18, starting at 1 p.m.

Both borrow from and then upend traditional narrative conventions. Haynes channels three distinct genres for Poison: a television news documentary, a B-movie horror flick, and a gritty prison diary. As the movie progresses, the storylines intercut more frequently and converge, avoiding narrative closure and transgressing “straight” film language.

“Poison, when I first saw it, when I was a teenager, rewired my brain about what it was that a movie could be and what it was that a queer filmmaker could do,” Grossman says.

In The People’s Joker, Drew takes on the canon of DC Comics, depicting the Joker as a trans woman trying to break into the Gotham comedy scene. The movie flits through the tones and styles of a variety of Batman eras; animated sequences create even more surreal possibilities. Proclaiming itself a “fair use film,” The People’s Joker holds no intellectual property sacred. Drew refashions and remixes both characters and story lines toward her own moviemaking ends.

“They’re playing with the same idea and doing so in completely different ways that speaks to their time and their place,” Grossman says of Haynes and Drew. Part of the goal in organizing the YBCA series is to create an artistic context — a lineage of independent cinema — that can bridge a generational gap in audiences.

“It’s really easy to get our blinders up and to think that we exist in this sort of isolated moment,” Grossman says. Yet thinking of the Reagan administration’s lack of response to the AIDS crisis, and the current proliferation of anti-trans bills, she says, “It’s hard not to see the parallels of what’s going on politically today.”

Next up for the series will be “Queer Vigilantes” on May 16, with Stephen Winter’s Chocolate Babies (1996) and Alice Maio Mackay’s T Blockers (2023). And on June 6, “Teen Death Drive” will feature Gregg Araki’s Totally Fucked Up (1993) and Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021).

If audiences emerge from all three Saturday screenings wanting more, Grossman is happy to report that Frameline 50, coming up June 17–27, will include a more extensive Trans New Weird program.

Ultimately, she hopes Trans New Weird films will inspire audiences just like the New Queer Cinema films inspired her the first time she saw them.

“We want to make you pick up a camera and go make something,” she says of the YBCA series. “This program is all in the spirit of getting people to make movies that reflect themselves, to make art that reflects their experience.”

‘New Queer Cinema x Trans New Weird: Who Owns Our Image?’ plays at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (701 Mission St., San Francisco) on Saturday, April 18, at 1 p.m. Future screenings will take place on May 16 and June 6, also at 1 p.m.