Commissioned at the start of 2020 and produced throughout lockdown, Inside Out Shorts is a series of films exploring the relationship between our inner lives and creativity, produced in collaboration with The Smalls.
Can you introduce your film?
Damian is a love story; on the surface level between two men but on another level between one transgender man and all aspects of himself. It follows the title character who falls for a man he meets at a party with the cycle of this burgeoning relationship coinciding with his menstrual cycle. Just as love is as natural as eating food, so is the menstrual cycle, and this film depicts Damian’s navigation of all of these aspects of his life.
The commission was originally part of Inside Out, a season exploring our inner lives and creativity and how art can help us better understand ourselves and empathise with others’ experience of the world. How did your film respond to these ideas?
With ‘Damian’ I wanted to be creative with how we identify with the lead character through normalising his experiences. I wanted to explore the idea of a transgender man’s relationship with masculinity and how this aspect of himself doesn’t have to be compromised by mundane but heavily politicised bodily functions like periods. As a cisgender woman, I know how frustrating it can be to navigate menstruation without being able to discuss it openly and without being self-conscious, so how much more complicated must it be for transgender men who have periods? To get a sense of how normal this is, I wanted to embed the plotline of Damian’s cycle with two very normal and natural occurrences: eating and falling in love. I also wanted to speak to the idea of exploring our inner lives by not including any dialogue and letting each character’s inner dialogue be expressed without exposition.