Dillon Chapman on Hazel Katz

Sydney & Kim, 2023, poster for Super 16 mm film, 17 min.

[Image description: A red film poster with text that reads “Sydney & Kim.” There is an image of two women sitting in a bathroom, one on the toilet to the left, the other on the floor to the right. Both women have light skin and dark hair. The one on the left wears a t-shirt, while the one on the right is nude.]

Hazel Katz is a filmmaker with a singular voice. Her body of work largely comprises well-researched, yet humorous and emotionally arresting, hybrid documentaries, which span topics from trans history and sex work (Sulka’s Daughters, 2022)  to the impact of COVID 19 on the carceral system (Who Gets to Die, 2021). If these topics at first seem at odds or disparate, then you, like I, perhaps do not have the panoramic perspective on the interlocking hegemonic systems that have rendered this contemporary hellscape. Katz typically looks at things with a wide lens, incorporating found footage and audio, combined with original footage and voice recordings, and at times, animation, to create stimulating and resonant works of art. She has a distinctive understanding of the systems that we live our lives within, through, and between, and oscillates between the macro and micro in order to present a matrix view of the world through moving images.

In her new film, Sydney & Kim, a narrative short shot on 16 mm film, Katz dissects the complexities of care around queerness, medicalized transsexuality, and disability. Her influences include the films of New Queer Cinema, a wave of indie and DIY filmmaking starting in the early 90s that push back against the more sanitized representations of Gay people cropping up as a result of the AIDS crisis, particularly the work of legendary filmmaker Gregg Arraki, and perhaps most importantly the 1985 film Buddies, written and directed by Arthur J. Bressan Jr., which was the first film to deal directly with the AIDS pandemic. Many of the relational dynamics of Katz’s film echo those of Bressan Jr. 's, whilst the aesthetics of the film give it the feel of something plucked from the 90s and dropped into our contemporary moment. When I watched it, I felt as if I was being shown a cult classic (which I am sure it will become).

Sydney & Kim (trailer), 2023, Super 16 mm film, 17 min.

Katz gave me a private screening of her new film in an editing suite at the Visual Arts Facility at UC San Diego. It opens with Kim (played by Sasha Forests) pushing Sydney (played by Masha Breeze) in a wheelchair down an alley, behind a set of buildings and bordered on the other side by desert landscape. Kim  sings gleefully until Sydney interrupts– she expresses annoyance that  Kim was so late to pick her up. From what? We don’t know exactly, but the bandage around Sydney’s head suggests FFS (Facial Feminization Surgery), for the tgirls that know. Kim responds with a kind of therapy speak that at once acknowledges her own shortcomings  yet also feels dismissive. The dynamic is thus clearly established for the audience: Sydney relies on Kim, but Kim is perhaps not the kind of person one ought to rely on. What is unclear is what kind of relationship this is. Are they friends? Lovers? Lesbian exes who are friends again? The latter seems likely, but again, uncertain. This is an erotic charge that is easily recognizable for the queers. Sydney tells Kim that she needs to pee and the title cards roll. The subtitles inform us that pee is indeed splashing.

We cut to the exterior of a motel where they are greeted by JR (played by Connor Foster), the heteronormative young man who runs the place. Seeing her bandaged head, he asks Sydney if she is alright, but Kim quickly dismisses that concern, asking if “all the rooms come with a microwave.” This barren desert motel is where the rest of the film plays out. The heat of the desert forces the characters into a claustrophobic environment which serves to amplify the toxicity of Sydney and Kim’s relationship: they are effectively trapped inside. Over the next several days (months?) Sydney gradually heals from her operation, as Kim functions as both caregiver and agitator while she flirts with JR in order to avoid having to pay for the motel room that the girls presumably cannot afford. Kim rarely appears alone, except for one scene in which she scavenges a khaki trench coat from the littered desert brush nearby. This scene further contextualizes Kim for the viewer: she’s queer, she’s punk, she’s DIY, and she does what she needs to, making do with the resources available to her. Her interactions with JR are complicated for this reason—it is unclear if she is truly interested in him or if he is merely a means to an end. This is a fragile ecosystem she has cultivated to sustain Sydney and herself. Kim is the hinge between the other characters—Sydney and JR do not interact on camera until the penultimate scene of the film. Kim’s flirtation with JR, which is slinky yet condescending, is cut parallel to Sydney’s isolation in the motel room. 

Kim slowly abandons Sydney for JR’s attention (he’s “so normal… it’s hot”) while complaining about how needy and high-maintenance Sydney is. This hits like a punchline—it is clear that Kim needs to be needed, while Sydney grows more and more comfortable in her solitude as she heals from her surgery. This codependent relationship is triggering for me, and probably many queer viewers. Many queer people grow up in homes and in a culture where they do not see themselves reflected back, so when we get a glimpse of that, we cling to the person who has mirrored us in this crucial way. Most of us have trauma around our queerness or gender nonconformity and finding other people who feel similarly can be cathartic. This is a kind of toxic bond that can form the foundation of many queer relationships, spanning the range of friends to lovers and every conceivable in-between. Kim constantly infantilizes Sydney and intellectualizes her emotions, but is also present for her when she is in pain, helping her smoke one of her pain relief pills. There are true moments of intimacy, levity, and love at play in this friendship, but it’s clear that Sydney’s needs are only important when they feed Kim’s desire to control their relationship—there exists an almost parent/child dynamic In this way, as Kim exercises power over Sydney. It reminds me of too many formative friendships in my own life, especially as a teenager and in my early twenties. That is the genius of Katz’s film—the nuances specific to queer relationships shine through, and suggest just how complicated those dynamics can be.

With a runtime of just 17 minutes, Katz’s film deftly eviscerates contemporary queer representation—steeped as it is in respectability politics—with a smart, funny, and triggering-ly real portrayal of the messiness of queer relationships. It is this honesty that gives the film resonance. The tension between the three characters builds to a boiling point in the penultimate scene in which Kim and Sydney’s roles are reversed (JR is just an innocent bystander sucked into their whirlpool) and the dynamics of their relationship are irrevocably changed. What remains unclear is whether or not this change has been for the better. 

Unlike the sanitized trans/gender-expansive media that we are being fed in popular culture, Katz’s film eschews the Saint/Victim dichotomy that underlies the history of trans representation in film. To compensate for the culture war on trans/gender-expansive people unfurling in the U.S. right now, much of liberal popular media presents an ironically puritanical interpretation of trans people that is often two-dimensional and simplified. In a word: assimilationist. While this is an understandable attempt at damage control, it makes trans/gender-expansive people seem alien to the average viewer. Sydney and Kim are both complex, caring, and, at times, shitty people. Just like the rest of us. They are not meant to be worshiped as idols or pitied for their misfortune, they simply are. Katz uses the film as a microcosmic analysis of queer relationships, with a heteronormative bystander, which offers differing windows into the narrative. Viewers who have experienced a dynamic like Sydney and Kim’s can relate to the specificity of that relationship. Those who haven’t are interlopers, like JR—neither inside nor outside—standing in the doorway of the situation. By respecting the emotional intelligence of her viewers, Katz makes space for empathy without a propagandistic slant.

I see Sydney & Kim’s handling of trans representation as revolutionary. Never are the characters labeled as trans and never are their genders questioned. Though these facts might be mistaken for incidental, they are integral to the plot. Integral to the realistic precarity of the two titular characters’ situation. This legibly queer film serves as an antidote to the mostly saccharine, sanitized, and misguided media films about trans/gender-expansive people that have been made over the past decade. I think of the representations of queerness and gender expansivity in something like Netflix’s Heartstopper (adapted from Alice Oseman’s series of graphic novels). Everything is too clean, too perfect. Bullies are bad people, full stop. Queerness is a beacon of love and light. While I enjoy this series, it is not a realistic portrayal of queerness, and it plays into the puritanical ideas weaving themselves in and through popular culture, which suggests that if we are simply “good” people, bad things won’t happen to us, and if they do, the perpetrators will be appropriately punished and contrite. That simply isn’t the way the world currently works (maybe in a utopic/dystopic future). The messy humanness presented in Katz’s film is precisely the kind of representation that makes trans people relatable, even in our differences. This kind of filmmaking has the potential to affect real cultural change, because it neither sanctifies its subjects nor panders to its audience. Instead it highlights a particular kind of care extended amongst queer/trans/gender-expansive people—that bond of queerness compels them to just show up for each other. In a homophobic and transphobic culture, unconditional care is rarely extended to queer/trans/gender-expansive people (roughly half of homeless youth are LGBT+, abandoned and rejected by their parents), so perhaps that is why a sense of communal care is so central to queer culture. The quality of that care, though—as we see in the film—is another matter entirely.

Dillon Chapman is a San Diego-based artist, educator, and cultural critic.