Experimental session

Open

Directed by: Jake Yuzna
Interpreted by: Jendeen Forberg, Daniel Luedtke, Tempest Crane
Feature Film, United States, 2009
90´

Jury Teddy Award at the Berlin Film Festival 2010
Première in Spain

Open is a curious work, with great sensitivity and gentleness, when dealing with such an unusual topic as the gender transversality. With a minuscule budget, non-professional actors and a minimalist dialogue, the young director Jake Yuzna, shows us different superimposed love stories of real people in search for their sexual identity through plastic surgery, pushing the boundaries of love, sex, and gender.

Gen, born as male, and his partner, Jay born as female, undergo plastic surgery and sex change therapy with the goal to look like each other as much as possible, and become pandrogynous. During their travels picking up homeless people, they run into Cynthia, a hermaphrodite, who will fall fatally in love. Meantime, Nick, a transsexual meets Syd and they have a romance.

A story with characters that are everything but conventional, a work with people that cannot be classified in the conventional sex gender, set in industrial and deconstructed atmosphere, empty but with great visual intensity, such as deserted parking lots, salt warehouses, building and rooftops. A singular experimental work.