A Boy Named Sue

A film by Julie Wyman

2000 | 56 minutes | Color | DVD | Order No. 01712

SYNOPSIS

Julie Wyman's compelling documentary chronicles Theo's transformation from a woman to a man over the course of six years. The film successfully captures Theo's physiological and psychological changes during the process, as well as their effects on his lesbian lover and community of close friends. Taking full advantage of the unlimited access she received into an extraordinarily personal process, Wyman carefully composes a moving story about gender identity, relationships, and how even things that seem permanent can change.

"A BOY NAMED SUE is one of the best videos to date on female-to-male trans[gender] experience. Wyman spent six years taping Sue's transformation into Theo and then organized a huge archive of material into a moving, informative and smart rendering of what a difference sex reassignment surgeries can make not only to the transsexual himself but also to all those in his immediate circle. Theo is a great subject and Wyman is a talented and imaginative documentarian. If you are looking for a sensitive and sophisticated representation of transsexual experience, look no further." Judith Halberstam, University of California, San Diego

PRESS

"This is the best 'Trans' documentary I've ever seen. It's unique in the way it follows Theo and his partner for an extended period of time, and in the way it refuses the simple purpose-accomplishment narrative in favor of a complex, warts-and-all look."

Allaquere Rosanne Stone University of Texas, Austin

"A rousing tape...The faint of heart should beware of the hormone injections, but most of us will find 'A Boy Named Sue' simply jubilant and engrossing."

Amy Villarejo Cornell University

SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS

  • LA, SF, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Portland, and Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
  • Reel Affirmations, Washington, D.C.
  • Film Arts Festival, San Francisco
  • Image Out Rochester Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
  • Image et Nations, Montreal Lesbian and Gay Festival
  • Berlin Lesbian Film Festival
  • Feminale Women's Film Festival

ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)

Julie Wyman

Julie Wyman is an award-winning filmmaker and a performer, writer, and professor. Her 2004 film, Buoyant, screened at MoMA New York, the Walker Arts Center, the La Jolla MoCA, and at festivals internationally. Her full-length documentary, A Boy Named Sue (2000) aired on Showtime, the MTV’s Logo TV, and screened at festivals internationally, winning the 2001 Sappho Award for Best Documentary and receiving a nomination for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’s Media Award for Best Documentary. Wyman’s writing has been published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest and an edited volume entitled Scholarly Acts. Wyman is also a member of the artist/activist collective BLW whose performance work, has been featured at venues including the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco, Pilot Television, Chicago, and the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford. Wyman holds an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. She is currently a Professor of Digital Filmmaking in the Cinema and Technocultural Studies Department at UC Davis.

Wyman’s most resent project, entitled Strong!, chronicles an athlete’s struggle to defend her champion status as her lifetime weightlifting career inches towards its inevitable end. STRONG! explores the contradiction of a body that is at once celebrated within the confines of her sport and shunned by mainstream culture. (8/14)

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