As a student in New York University’s graduate film school, Rashaad Ernesto Green didn’t take the easy route in preparing his thesis project. The 32-year-old screenwriter and director had been impressed by Transamerica, Boys Don’t Cry, and The Crying Game—three successful features that revolved around gender identity. Green, who is of Puerto Rican and African-American descent, decided to create a gripping and authentic family drama, albeit with a twist. He wanted to cast a trans actor in a film that explores the relationship between a Hispanic father and a teenage son transitioning into a woman. His script for Gun Hill Road, which won rave reviews at the Sundance Film Festival, was inspired by events in Green’s extended family.

“I saw a child that really needed her father and they couldn’t necessarily come together,” the filmmaker told the Georgia Straight by phone from New York. “I wanted to make a piece of art that didn’t give them all the answers, but pointed them toward the direction of love and acceptance.”

Green wrote the father’s character with veteran actor Esai Morales in mind. Best known for his roles in NYPD Blue and as the troubled older brother of Ritchie Valens in the 1987 hit film La Bamba, Morales was well-suited to portray the seething, explosive character of Enrique, who comes out of prison to be reunited with his wife and androgynous son. Green was thrilled when Morales accepted the leading role. “This is somebody I had looked up to since I was eight years old,” Green revealed.

Television actor Judy Reyes signed on as the mother, and then the really hard work began to find what Green referred to as the “real deal” to play the role of Michael/Vanessa. And he knew that this person couldn’t be found through a traditional casting call. So he started visiting LGBT organizations in New York during the day and various clubs at night. He met with transsexual women and distributed flyers to anyone who might fit the role. Eventually, he ran into Harmony Santana at a Pride parade in Queens, where she was working at an HIV-prevention booth.

“Her name wasn’t even Harmony at the time, but she stood up and said she wanted to audition,” Green recalled. “I was a little confused because what I saw was a boy. And she took off her sunglasses and had the most androgynous, angelic, and beautiful face I had seen. And she told me that she was at the beginning of her transition. She was Puerto Rican and Dominican, which made up Esai Morales’s and Judy Reyes’s cultural backgrounds.”

Green invited her to an audition, and was impressed by her ability to act naturally. Then he asked her to return dressed as a woman. “She did and she was beautiful,” he said. “I told her she had the part then and there, and I was going to put her through a pretty extensive training workshop in order to get her ready for production.”

When filming began, she informed the crew that she was a woman and wanted to be referred to as “she”. Green admitted that was challenging for some on the set because she arrived every day dressed as a boy to play the role of Michael. “The transition that you see taking place on-screen was something that was taking place in her own life at the same time,” Green explained.

Watch the trailer for Gun Hill Road.

Gun Hill Road is one of several films focusing on gender identity that will be screened at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival (August 11 to 22). During a recent visit to the Georgia Straight office, the festival’s director of programming, Amber Dawn, said there is a “palpable authenticity” to Santana’s character because she has lived the experience of being a trans woman.

“I wanted to look for dramas, for narrative films, for comedies that starred trans people playing trans people, as opposed to a famous actress, like Hilary Swank or Felicity Huffman,” Amber Dawn commented. “So I found some, and I’m really excited to share them.”

Another of those films is Paulista, a Brazilian feature focusing on three relationships. There’s a lesbian affair, a heterosexual coupling, and a love story between a trans woman, played by Portuguese trans actor Maria Clara Spinelli, and her male coworker. Spinelli’s character Suzana, a lawyer, wants to reveal her identity to her boyfriend, but doesn’t know how this will be received.

“She’s not going to be at an Academy Award ceremony six months later as a different gender and [in] a different reality,” Amber Dawn noted. “This is her identity.”

Watch the trailer for Paulista.

A third film, Open, is perhaps the most daring picture in the festival. Featuring gay, intersex, and trans characters, it portrays two extremely unconventional relationships. The film opens with a loving, pandrogynous couple, Gen and Jay, who undergo plastic surgery to make themselves appear more similar to one another. This fascinates an intersex nurse at the clinic, Cynthia, who dumps her husband and goes on a road trip with Gen. The second tale involves a gay man, Nick, who falls deeply in love with a trans man named Syd.

“When you are that far from the status quo, the opportunities to represent yourself in media and show audiences who you really are is very rare,” Amber Dawn stated.

In a phone interview with the Straight from New York, director Jake Yuzna—nephew of horror filmmaker Brian Yuzna—said that he wanted bring the actors’ real-life experiences to the screen in a dramatic picture. The multiple-award-winning movie stars Tempest Crane and Jendeen Forberg, a real-life pandrogynous couple, as well as intersex actor Gaea Gaddy, gay actor Daniel Luedtke, and trans man Morty Diamond, a New York–based filmmaker.

“At the heart of it, these are people,” Yuzna declared. “And they’re not weirdos.”

The director didn’t want his trans characters to be sex workers or to talk about transitioning because, in his opinion, those are the only tales ever told about this community. The cinematography alternates between gorgeous shots of nature, some of which take place in the past, and gritty urban settings, creating a dreamlike mood. There is the occasional scene, such as a woman collapsing in a shower, that seems inexplicable. Yuzna said that he purposely left aspects of the film open-ended to allow audiences to fill in the blanks and draw their own conclusions.

“The title has to do with, hopefully, the effect on the viewer: to open ourselves up in all sorts of different ways—and to see possibilities that are still left intact when it comes to sex and love, and just how we live.”

Gun Hill Road screens next Friday (August 12) and on August 19 at the Edgewater Casino; Paulista screens on August 14 at the Rio Theatre and on August 18 at Cineplex Odeon International Village Cinemas; Open screens at the Vancity Theatre on August 16.