(2023, 89 min)
Country: United States
Director: Jordan Bryon & Monica Villamizar
Studio: AGC Studios
Language: English
SYNOPSIS: Filmmaker Jordan Bryon from Australia is followed as he goes through a transformation while working with Taliban soldiers./P>
REVIEW:
Monica Villamizar and Jordan Bryon’s “Transition” earns its mordantly punny title. It’s a documentary and (and self-portrait of) its co-director, a journalist who found themselves in a situation that would sound like the premise of a dark comedy if the stakes weren’t life-and-death: Bryon began transitioning to a trans man at the same time that the subject of his New York Times video dispatches, Afghanistan, was transitioning back to Taliban rule after the US military ended its occupation in 2021.
As if Bryon’s situation weren’t already fraught with potential peril—war zones aren’t known as welcoming places for people who aren’t straight-identifying cisgender men—he’s embedded with Taliban fighters whose leadership is restoring laws and policies that subjugate women. It’s an incidentally perfect setup for a film that’s curious about how people identify as male or female and then devote much of their lives to reinforcing that identity through dress, grooming, body language, and bonding rituals. Bryon discusses the challenges they face with sympathetic parties, including a loving mom, but war journalism requires him to maintain an identity that he’s secretly preparing to deactivate and put behind him.
One key is Bryon learning to acknowledge privileges that he used to take for granted—and still enjoys to a certain extent. One of his colleagues, Iranian photojournalist Kiana Hayeri, responds to his affectionate description of his Taliban sources by noting that he wouldn’t be so welcomed if he weren’t male-identifying, a foreigner, and most of all a journalist they hope will portray them sympathetically. The word “loyalty” comes under the movie’s microscope, too, as Bryon’s inner circle—including his friend “Teddy,” who’s done well for himself by helping foreigners, and his doctor, who has gotten used to the country and says he’s going to stick around no matter what. Without putting too fine a point on it, the movie connects the protagonist to the country he’s covering by showing how different people react when a once familiar reality grows increasingly alien.
The movie is equally compelling as a you-are-there war documentary that shows the chaos and destruction with terrifying immediacy. There are firefights, explosions, aerial tracking shots revealing staggering devastation, and unstinting accounts of the country’s plunge into more raggedy chaos than it had grown accustomed to when the US-controlled at least some parts of the land. Nothing is excessively smoothed-over, and rather than force comparisons or contrasts between aspects that don’t have a lot in common, "Transition" has enough assurance to step back and let picture and sound take over.
-- Reviewed By Matt Zoller Seitz, EditorRogerEbert.com (http://www.rogerebert.com/)
