Perhaps the most unnervingly unexpected film I stumbled upon in 2023, Monica Villamizar and Jordan Bryon’s Transition follows co-director Bryon, a veteran Australian journo granted exclusive access to a group of Talib fighters just as Afghanistan is collapsing back into their human rights-abusing hands. Which is a complicated situation for any Western reporter to be in, but especially for Bryon, who happens to be a trans man passing as a cis man in this lethally patriarchal world.
Of course, this undoubtedly makes the journalist a sympathetic character – at least for liberal-leaning critics like myself who attend events such as Tribeca Festival, where I caught the doc when it premiered. Bryon’s a conflict documentarian who’s long dedicated himself to the Afghan nation and its people, bringing their stories to the larger world through a variety of international outlets (including the NY Times, the corporate empire he’s freelancing for when he manages to embed with the jihadi unit).
Which brings me (a genderqueer chick) to the real uncomfortable aspect of this saga, an elephant in the room that seems intentionally sidestepped at every turn – the cis male privilege that allowed Bryon to nab that scoop in the first place. For while the doc takes us on the very personal journey of one man attempting to get closer to his own truth (which includes doctor’s visits for hormones and crossing borders for top surgery in Iran) while living a lie for the safety of himself and others, the bigger picture is consistently avoided. For what Transition is really about is decision-making, action-taking – and the stories a person might tell oneself to justify the consequences.
Indeed, there’s an unnervingly immature element that runs throughout, in the sense that Bryon seems to think he can and has the right to have it all – from an exclusive story to the ability to grow facial hair. He shouldn’t have to choose. But life involves learning to make sacrifices for the good of others; and that same doggedness that makes Bryon such a topnotch reporter is also blinding him at every turn.
For Bryon’s convinced himself that he has to pass in order to keep his colleagues safe – without asking himself why he’s even still there, potentially putting all involved in danger. Is he really the only journalist who can get this story? And what exactly is the story? We see him filming the fighters good-naturedly sharing a meal together, lovingly playing with their young kids – i.e, behaving like normal human beings. But is the banality of evil really an “exclusive” 60 years after the great Arendt gave us that revelation?
And even more disturbing yet is another possible truth – that Bryon has become enamored with his male privilege, addicted to cis male bonding like a decorated combat vet to battle. In one telling scene, the journo even admits to preferring Afghanistan to Australia since he has no past in the country; which is another way of saying he can be a real man there. Inevitably, returning home means living as just another trans man. Nevertheless, it is something he does eventually choose to do, at least for his post-mastectomy recovery. Yet even then he can’t let go of the cis male life, and ends up keeping in touch with a fighter he’s grown fond of – to the point of putting his all-accepting mom on the phone to say hello. “He’s so much more multidimensional than just being a Talib,” Bryon offers with a straight face.
Though Bryon also explains to his doting mother that he didn’t feel he had an obligation to divulge his trans truth to those he was filming. It wouldn’t have been safe, he reasons (reasonably, but without ever acknowledging that he didn’t have an obligation to stay and accept the great risk to himself and others either). To which his mom readily agrees, while allowing that “there is an element of betrayal,” before quickly shifting to the odd rationale that a journalist has to go “underground” to dig deep for a story. “But that’s the nature of a documentary, isn’t it?” she asks rhetorically.
Is it? In the end I was left with far more puzzling questions than answers: Primarily, who is this documentary really for?