Castration Movie Chapter iii. Junior Ghosts—Premorphic Drift; a fragmentary passage

ERIC SAYS Please note: you absolutely do not need to have seen previous chapters of Castration Movie to follow (and have a great experience with) this chapter!

There are a few key filmmakers who, in recent years, can be said to be building a new vocabulary of images for trans cinema: Jane Schoenbrun, Vera Drew, and Louise Weard. With Castration Movie Chapter iii. Junior Ghosts—Premorphic Drift; a fragmentary passage, Weard continues to expand the most ambitious project of this new vanguard of trans film voices, a multi-year, multi-volume collection of interrelated stories, each of which also functions as a stand-alone work. With its lo-fi, hand-held aesthetic and collaborative ethos (Schoenbrun has a meaty supporting role in this episode and Drew is an associate producer, for instance), the Castration Movie project emphasizes immediacy over virtuosity—and is all the stronger for it.

This latest chapter reminds me of nothing more than Fassbinder in the 1970s, as, with films like Fox and His Friends and In a Year of 13 Moons, he staked out the right for LGBTQ creators to not just have representation on screen, but to have dimensionality: living, breathing, imperfect characters, warts and all. Castration Movie Chapter iii., like those films, is a character-driven film with exceptional depth and nuance—and one that thrusts the audience headfirst into unfiltered conversations about identity with no speed limits or safety belts. It’s a film at once welcoming and confrontational—and one sure to spark some fascinating conversations out on Charles Street once the lights come up.