프로그램 노트

Program Note

Trans Memoria is an autobiographical and deeply intimate documentary directed by transgender filmmaker Victoria Verseau. Victoria, along with her friends Athena and Aamina—fellow trans women who have undergone gender confirmation surgery—visits a hotel in Thailand in 2019. It is the same hotel where Victoria had stayed in 2012 with her late friend Meril for their surgeries. Together, the three retrace the traces of the past in search of what might have led Meril to make the irreversible choice of death.

To uncover that origin, the film unfolds a sequence of fragments: video diary footage from Victoria's surgery, conversations and performative reenactments with her friends, and images of ruin. These elements bear witness to and metaphorically express the inescapable physical pain involved in reconstructing the male body into a female one. Victoria weeps in front of the trembling camera, overcome by pain; her friends speak about the emotional and physical hardships of navigating relationships with men in imperfectly feminized bodies.

The desolate imagery of Thailand—beaches littered with sea creature remains, moss-filled abandoned buildings flooded with water, and rotting, foul-smelling fruit—resonates with the deep wounds of artificially severed flesh and the horrific state of the body forced to endure them. These testimonies and visuals together suggest that Meril’s death may not have been a coincidence, but an inevitability.

And yet, the three friends remain by each other’s side, proving that the only possible way to overcome death is through relationships that share and hold the weight of pain. (KIM Kyung-tae)