BEFORE I CHANGE MY MIND - 7:00 pm
Director: Trevor Anderson | 89 min | Canada | 2022
Written by: Trevor Anderson, Fish Griwkowsky
1987: While the other students wonder if new kid Robin is a boy or a girl, Robin forges a complicated bond with the school bully, making increasingly dangerous choices to fit in.
6:45pm: Be sure to arrive EARLY, for a special 80’s-themed PRE-SHOW performance by Just Glue (@thejustglue) and Karly Klimax (@karlyklimax)!
7:00pm: Screening!
8:30pm: Q&A with the filmmakers
9:00pm: Opening night party & reception with music, cash bar, DJ and dancing.
Director’s statement:
Making this movie has allowed me to explore my own complex relationship to gender. Over the past few years, I’ve come to understand that the word nonbinary is a way of describing what I’ve always known to be true about myself. When I was a teenager in the 1980s – the age and era of the movie’s hero Robin – I had no words for this experience. I was often asked, “Are you a boy or a girl?” and I wish I could have let that question hang in the air unanswered like Robin does in the film. At the beginning of the film, Robin is confronted with the question, “What are you?” We watch as Robin slowly exchanges that question for a bigger one, “What kind of person am I?” In this way, we are able to explore the inner, emotional reality of not having words to describe your gender yet not letting your gender define you.
The script, by my writing partner Fish Griwkowsky and me, avoids all gendered pronouns for Robin: no one within the world of the film calls Robin “he,” “she,” or “they.” We intentionally avoided writing a moment of gender disclosure in the story because I don’t believe Robin knows satisfactory words for their gender yet. Likewise, we avoided showing other characters assign a gender to Robin – something we can be sure would be happening offscreen – so as not to misgender Robin within the film. This keeps the focus on Robin’s interior, subjective experience of being in the world. When we talk about the movie in the present day, we can refer to Robin as a nonbinary character and use they/them pronouns to refer to Robin – just as the nonbinary actor who plays Robin, Vaughan Murray, does themself. Outside the text of the film, we can use the language of today to talk about something that existed – but often went unexpressed – in the past.
As for me, it’s technically correct that my gender is nonbinary; though when Dorothy Parker was complimented on her nonfiction, she said, “I don’t write non-anything.” I’m more like Bartleby, the GenderScrivener: “I would prefer not to.” I’m told this makes me agender. I smile and shrug, wait for the language to change around me again. As for my pronouns, I’ve grown comfortable in the “he, him, his” the world has dressed me in. These three little words have become like everyday drag, like a grandfather’s hand-me-down three-piece suit. I needed to set Robin free into the world to start making sense of all this. I hope that others may also see themselves in Robin’s story.
MUSIC NOTES
Composer Lyle Bell and writer-director Trevor Anderson were in a band together, The Wet Secrets, from 2005 to 2016. They kept a Spotify playlist of songs during the making of Before I Change My Mind, to inspire the tone of the film. It can be heard here.
