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Southern ComfortGRAND JURY PRIZE SUNDANCE
WINNER BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL WINNER SEATTLE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL JURY PRIZE, HOT DOCS FILM FESTIVAL FIRST PRIZE ENGLISH | 90 MIN | DVD | Southern Comfort is a 90-minute documentary about a 52-year-old female-to-male transsexual named Robert Eads who lives in the back hills of Georgia. "A hillbilly and proud of it," he cuts a striking figure – sharp-tongued, bearded, tobacco pipe in hand – Robert passes so well as a male that the local KKK asked him to join. Though his home is nestled among tranquil hills dotted with hay bales, Robert confronts a world as hostile to him as if he were a black in the ante-bellum South. He was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, then turned away by over two dozen doctors who feared that taking on a transgendered patient might harm their practice. The film follows the final year of Robert's life. Beginning in spring, Robert falls deeply in love with Lola, a male-to-female. That summer, his mother and father drive ten hours to visit their "lost daughter," a trip they know may be their last. Robert's final dream is to make it to the Southern Comfort Conference in Atlanta, America's preeminent transgendered gathering. Beating the odds, Robert addresses a crowd of 500 and takes Lola to "The Prom that Never Was." The voices in Southern Comfort are not only rarely heard, they are commonly thought not to exist, even with the enormous success of Boys Don't Cry. A rare blend of humor, romance, and tragedy, Southern Comfort is the first film to intimately tell a trans-to-trans love story, set against a disturbing tale of gender bias as it unfolds before the camera. |