In honor of International Transgender Day of Visibility, global streaming network Revry will premiere the award-winning, Sundance-backed documentary series America in Transition (AIT), a Revry Original that explores the community, family, and social issues of trans people of color across in the United States.
Transgender Filmmaker, educator and community Organizer, André Pérez, founded the Trans Oral History Project in 2008 motivated by the isolation he felt growing up in a military family in Virginia. Perez journeyed across the country to document the subjects of the series. Each of the four episodes explores one 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. AIT uses character-driven storytelling in order to highlight issues of importance to trans people in marginalized communities.
“America in Transition is a compelling and powerful portrait of trans people surviving in a world built for their exclusion. André Pérez tells these stories with the empathy and understanding that only another trans person can.” —Zachary Drucker, Producer of Transparent
“Over the past seven years, I’ve interviewed trans folks across the country who express parallel stories of being told trans didn’t fit with other aspects of our personhood,” said creator André Pérez. “How can you be trans and Muslim or black or Mexican or Southern? We found ways to reconcile the seemingly disparate parts of who we are.”
“At what point will this country start to defend and protect me?”
– North Carolina’s Z Shane Zaldivar, a U.S. Marine discharged under “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” who finds himself and his wife under attack due to NC’s anti-trans HB2 bill.
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.
“We’re in an amazing moment,” said Perez, reflecting on the growing representation of trans people in mainstream media. “Part of what’s inspiring me about being a media maker is that media really changes our imagination of what the future could be. In a lot of ways, it’s really hard to envision what change looks like on the ground with big issues like racism, but when I think about how fast we can change with the media? Our role as media makers is to stimulate this imagination of an alternate world we can live in, and then we can build the bridge to get there.”
Episodes 1-3 are now available to watch on Revry.
Related: Watch Episode 1 of the POC web series Eden’s Garden
