When Louise Weard started capturing her debut film in 2023, she envisaged it as a quick, 90-minute portrait of a gaggle of queer and transgender associates in Vancouver. Now, Castration Movie, a crowdfunded camcorder epic made for lower than C$60,000 (£33,000), runs four-and-a-half hours. And that’s simply half one. When your entire magnum opus is completed later this yr, Weard estimates it is going to clock in at greater than 12 hours. Take that, Béla Tarr. Watch your again, Rivette.
Not that anybody might mistake Castration Movie for sluggish cinema. “It’s not as if I’m asking you to watch farmers in a field for 20 minutes,” says the 31-year-old director over espresso in an east London cafe. Indeed not: the primary hour-and-a-half follows a budding “incel” as he sinks deeper into the manosphere. The narrative focus then switches abruptly to a trans sex employee, Michaela “Traps” Sinclair, performed by Weard. Michaela’s abrasive exterior conceals a craving for motherhood and intimacy; she might have the tongue of Joan Rivers and the decorum of Divine, however she’s as fragile as Edith Piaf. “People are always relieved when they find out I’m nothing like Michaela,” says Weard, whose background is in Canadian underground horror. “She’s the nightmare version of me.”
The film mixes Cassavetes-level rawness, a dazed Warholian languor and quotable banter worthy of Kevin Smith, together with a nutty dialog about Dune, in addition to a morbid Tinder date that provides most cringe. With its scenes of unsimulated sex, water-sports, self-harm (Weard is seen stubbing out a cigarette on her thigh) and the graphic aftermath of surgical procedure, Castration Movie’s checklist of set off warnings is longer than some movies’ scripts.
It’s all shot with the identical handheld Hi8 digital camera on which Weard’s mother and father filmed residence motion pictures when she was rising up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She digs it out from her bag and passes it throughout the desk. “Go ahead, play with the zoom,” she says. “You get a clean image where you can see the micro-expressions of what someone’s thinking.” Obeying these directions, I crash-zoom on to an excessive closeup of her. Dressed in a white shirt with blonde hair pulled again, a silver nose-ring and shrewd eyes behind dainty glasses, she is a useless ringer for the sardonic 22 Jump Street star Jillian Bell.
Many of the scenes in Castration Movie push incidents from Weard’s personal life to imagined extremes. One episode within the second instalment exhibits a girl reacting with horror when her skateboarder companion comes out as trans and asks to be referred to as Tiffany. “I came out when I was 27,” says Weard. “I was in the middle of doing the dishes. My girlfriend at the time was an angel, so supportive and excited for me. But the film takes real-life situations and asks: what are the worst intrusive thoughts you could have in this moment? What’s the worst possible outcome?”
From this emerges its goal: to coax audiences into empathising with characters who’re their ethical, ideological and political opposites. “Castration Movie has been hailed as this important trans work,” says Weard, who solid fellow trans administrators Vera Drew (The People’s Joker) and Alice Maio Mackay (T Blockers) within the film; Lilly Wachowski, co-creator of the Matrix franchise, additionally contributed to the crowdfunding marketing campaign. “Then the movie opens and you don’t see a single trans person on screen for the first 90 minutes.”
There is a logic to such seemingly perverse selections. “Each chapter is training the audience how to watch the next section,” she says. “Seeing this cis guy experience gender failure, you learn the beats of his story and you can apply them to Michaela, too. What I’m saying on a deeper level is that there are those at the margins who we don’t want to think about, but who are the same as us. We’re all people, right? We all share some universal experience of what it means to be human. In part two, there is a Terf and a detransitioner and an adult baby diaper lover. I want to show the shared humanity between them. They’re all a part of me. I even gave the incel my old name.”
The image’s leap in scale from thumbnail sketch to huge fresco occurred early on. Weard was exhibiting a producer buddy the scene through which a trans man on the eve of getting prime surgical procedure is eulogising the breasts which have served him nicely, giving thanks for all of the free beers and smokes that got here his method due to them. “I was fast-forwarding through the footage and my friend was, like: ‘Louise, stop. I want to watch the whole thing.’ When it was over, he said: ‘You’re not allowed to cut a fucking second of this.’ I pointed out that if I didn’t, this was going to be a 12-hour movie.’ And he said: ‘Well then, I guess you’re making a 12-hour movie.’”
That noun is essential. “Calling it Castration Movie undercuts the intimidation of the running time,” she causes. “This isn’t a film. This is definitely a movie.” The crowds who’ve been cramming into golf equipment and basements to observe it, hunkering down in beanbag chairs and ordering pizza in the course of the intermissions, appear to agree. “People tell me afterwards that it was the hardest they’ve ever laughed in a movie and the hardest they’ve ever cried. I want to keep that going. I’d love people to also feel it was the most turned on they’ve ever felt while watching a movie. Or the angriest.”
Her hopes that the image may have crossover enchantment will not be unrealistic. “In New York, we’d have, like, 100 trans women showing up to watch it together,” she says. “That never happens. Some of these girls aren’t leaving their house to do anything else that’s community-oriented. But I don’t think the movie will alienate viewers who aren’t part of that, so now it’s going out to a broader audience.” Having been seen within the UK in competition or membership settings, it is going to play subsequent month on the Prince Charles Cinema in London – not within the venue’s queer strand however as a part of its Bleak Week season alongside such numerous titles as Trainspotting, There Will Be Blood and Watership Down.
And there may be all the time the laptop computer possibility. The film was launched initially as a pay-what-you-like obtain with a C$1.50 minimal price, and continues to be out there in that format. Why? “Because it should be!” Weard says blithely. “I want people to see it. I’ll have a message from someone in Brazil who can’t afford the dollar, and if they reach out I send them a free link. People in Ukraine tell me the movie means a lot to them. A trans woman in Hong Kong said it reminded her of her friends. It’s crazy to have made something so hyperspecific to my experience and to find people around the world laughing at the same jokes.”
Her concern now’s what is going to occur as soon as she places Castration Movie to mattress. “What do I do next? I joked with a friend about getting a job doing Hallmark Christmas movies from now on. Because where else can I go after my 12-hour masterpiece?”
