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Through the Skin
US, 2002, 18 minutes, Color/BW, DVD
Order No. W03811
In this highly personal experimental autobiography, emerging filmmaker Elliot Montague presents a daring meditation on the experience and trauma of growing up androgynous. Incorporating home movies with vintage health public service announcements, along with his own performance pieces, Elliot jarringly discloses the conflicts between his changing female body with that of his gender and sexual identity. Through a montage of images set against a dissonant soundtrack, he speaks about the misunderstandings and tensions his identity struggle caused his family and the depression that later resulted. In scenes where Elliot binds his breasts, he painfully discloses how his parents sent him to a psychologist who diagnosed him with bi-polar disorder – a diagnosis that later proved to be incorrect. Exploring the complexities and implications of feeling androgynous in a female body, THROUGH THE SKIN presents more than a personal testimony on the transgender experience, it provokes universal questions on the meaning of gender.
AWARDS, FESTIVALS, & SCREENINGS

- European Media Arts Festival, Osnabruck, Germany
- Maine International Film Festival
- Women in the Director's Chair, Chicago
- Women in Cinema, Walker Art Center
- MIX Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, NYC
- Flaming Film Festival, Minneapolis
- Turin International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival
- Vancouver Underground Film Festival
- Paris Gay and Lesbian Film Festival
- North Carolina Gay and Lesbian Film Festival
- Seattle Gay and Lesbian Film Festival
- Media Arts Festival Friesland
- Estrofest, Atlanta
- WhamBam Trans Artfest
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QUOTES

“…a powerful work… With hypnotic intensity, the film is an assembly of emotionally nuanced landscapes, home movies of Elyse’s childhood, found footage, and peformative self-portraits…a truly remarkable piece that summarily transcends its immediate autobiographical concerns…”
Matt Soar & Bill Brand
Film & Photography Dept., Hampshire College
"…required viewing for all courses dealing with adolescence, body politics and queer issues. A complicated, layered, experimental meditation on becoming-feminine, the film explodes conventional vocabularies of cinema and of sexuality, breaking through walls
of anger and anxiety. A challenging, exciting film from a fresh new artist."
Amy Villarejo
Cinema Studies, Cornell University
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