Last night I took myself off to the Bath Film Festival to see Tangerine. The showing took place in a small arts center that looked and felt more like a folk club than a cinema. The audience looked more like a folk club too, in that they were mostly older than me (sorry Talis). Except of course this was Bath, so they also looked very staid and English middle class. We might have been in church. C of E, of course. I rather wondered what they were going to make of the film.

Hey bitches, we gon’ tell you what’s goin’ down, yo!

Welcome to Los Angeles, alien people of Bath.

Tangerine is a film set among the trans hooker community of LA. It is famous for two things. Firstly it was shot entirely on iPhone 5s. I am not competent to judge the effect or quality of this, though the colors did seem interesting at times. Secondly it not only stars trans women as trans women, it involved them in the production as well. Indeed the script is based on a true life experience of one of the stars, Kiki Rodriquez, who plays Sin-Dee Rella.

The basic plot is that Sin-Dee gets out of jail on Christmas Eve to find that her boyfriend, Chester, has been unfaithful while she was inside. She determines to take revenge. Chester is a pimp and a drug dealer, so perhaps this was all rather predictable.

Yeah, Chester is an arsehole. But then, when you sit back and think about it, every male character in the film is an arsehole in one way or another.

Quite a few of the women are not very nice either. This is, after all, a film about very poor people doing what they think they need to do to get by, and often making very poor decisions in the process.

The film is also a black farce. Because people do make poor decisions and then shit happens and it all kicks off.

This is a very long way from the sort of thing that is currently being done over here, or indeed in shows like I am Cait, to improve public opinion of trans people. I can just imagine the torrent of concern trolling that Sarah Ditum is going to produce over this. “Oh! *clutch pearls*, trans women are criminals, they are drug addicts, they swear all the time. How horrible! We must help them by locking them away and preventing them from doing those disgusting things that they do! Or at least stop them from doing them where we can see them.”

But you come to that conclusion only if you don’t think about what goes on in the film. Here are a few pointers.

Sin-Dee and her best friend, Alexandra (beautifully played by Mya Taylor) are women, pretty much indistinguishable from other LA hookers save for the thing in their pants that makes them valuable to a certain type of John. They are not “men in dresses” because they are not being played by men in dresses trying to channel what it is like being trans.

People do what they need to do to get by. Even Yeva, the Armenian immigrant woman whose husband has a thing for trans hookers, knows that.

Dinah, the white hooker, thinks that she’s better than Sin-Dee and Alexandra. She has, after all, been socialized to think that. She’s not.

Everyone has dreams, whether it is Alexandra’s singing career, Sin-Dee’s relationship with Chester, or Yeva’s happy home life. In Los Angeles most dreams are paper thin, masking the ugly reality beneath.

And when it comes down to it, trans women of color are on the bottom of the pile. All that they have is each other. The relationship between Sin-Dee and Alexandra is the most powerful thing in the film.

The end of the film was greeted in absolute silence. But that means that no one booed, and no one walked out. My indispensable new pal Ceri had her ears well tuned to comments as people left and there was some concern that the film had been exploitative. Trust me, it wasn’t. It was real. The Danish Girl will be exploitative, though most cis people watching it won’t understand why.

The bottom line is that Alexandra and Sin-Dee are girls very like me. They are girls like Roz Kaveney wrote about in Tiny Pieces of Skull. Roz went through a period of having to swim in that world; I got lucky and found Kevin so I avoided it. What Alexandra and Sin-Dee go through is reality for very many trans women around the world. If you can’t accept them because of how they live — if you need to have stories about white, middle class trans women in order to accept us — then you are not really doing the job.

If you’d like to see more of Mya Taylor, she has a staring role in a forthcoming short film about the life of Marsha P Johnson. The production company could do with some help with post production costs. Here’s the trailer.

Official Trailer for Happy Birthday, Marsha! from sasha wortzel on Vimeo.