Reporter’s Notebook: Transmoskva
The first in our Reporter’s Notebook series, Coda Story’s Amy Mackinnon takes you behind the scenes of the making of Transmoskva. The short documentary series tells the story of Vika, a transexual woman from Siberia.
In the beginning there were four.
Four transgender Russians to follow as we explored the question of what it is like to be trans in Putin’s Russia. There was Nastya, a beautician, James, an activist, Vika a truck driver and Nadia*, a student.
We spent hours filming with each of them but in the end only one made it into the film: Vika.
The film we ended up with, screened this weekend at the Side by Side film festival in St Petersburg, is not the film we set out to make. Stigma and safety proved to be, at times, insurmountable in getting access into the lives of those we were filming. One of the people we worked with was admitted to a psychiatric ward mid-way through filming and didn’t feel up to being filmed again. The story of what never made it into finished piece tells as much about what life is like for trans people in Russia today as the film itself.
For me, the greatest loss was Nastya, a bubbly beautician who works in a shop providing specialist services for Moscow’s transgender community. In the basement shop she was free to express herself and would twirl her A-line skirts for the camera.
Despite the recent crackdown on LGBT rights in Russia, she remained a proud patriot and spoke of Russia’s annexation of Crimea as a rightful return. She would recite Pushkin at a whim and play my favorite song from the beloved Soviet film ‘The Irony of Fate’ on her guitar.
With two children of her own, Nastya was very maternal. When we filmed her outside in a park, deep in the Moscow winter, she brought a flask of tea and fussed endlessly about whether Pascal, the director, was cold.
Nastya’s children understood that she was transgender; she continued to wear men’s clothes at home out of fear she may upset them. The hadn’t accepted who she was, but they understood, she once told me.
Nastya’s wife stuck by her as she began her transition. When we last spoke, Nastya wasn’t planning on changing her legal documents to reflect her gender because that would effectively turn their marriage into a same-sex one, not recognized under Russian law.
Nastya’s wife was a school teacher and she was worried she might lose her job if people found out that her partner was trans. Teachers have been fired in Russia for being LGBTQ or just for posting statements supportive of the community on social media. Unable to get the kind of access we needed into Nastya’s world, we had to remove her from the film altogether. Such a warm and genuine character, I was sad Nastya’s story never made it onto the screen.
Vika, whom we follow in the finished film, flung open her life to us and we accompanied her everywhere we could. We skid along behind her as she glided over Moscow’s icy streets. In the end though, most of the final film takes place in the street and in cafes. Vika’s landlord wouldn’t let us film in her apartment and the stigma of having a trans family member in Russia is such that, despite our best efforts, none of Vika’s relatives would speak to us. A transgender support group she attended in her hometown, Novosibirsk, was fearful of having its meeting place made public.
This lack of access meant we never see Vika in her own environment, or interacting with people other than medical professionals. In a roundabout way, this ended up capturing the isolation that Vika faced.
*Nadia is not her real name.
Watch the full series on the Coda Story Youtube Page
