"I actually had a few people tell me not to make this film." "The stereotypes that people are talking about are always caricatures shown one minute in a film, in and out, and they're either the butt of a joke or they're the moment of clarity or disgust or ridicule and they're never given ," he says. Transgender issues weren't as much in the zeitgeist when Tangerine initially began to bloom, and Baker says he was initially dissuaded from deconstructing these narratives focusing on two transgender women of color in his ambitious feature film. This is a story that grapples with betrayal, love and friendship, and ultimately the universal search for a connection. While it circles around contemporary conversations-such as the subjects of Caitlyn Jenner, the policing of bathrooms and the fight for appropriate pronouns based on personal identification of gender-instead of adhering to a transformational narrative or the tired trope of searching for an identity while transgender, Tangerine subverts these notions by focusing entirely on humans. The filming technology aside, Tangerine feels especially prescient in that it depicts what transgender men and women deal with on a daily basis. She became Baker and Bergoch's sherpa around the area, introducing them to working girls and boys and eventually the firecracker Rodriguez, who would later be the other half of her on-screen duo in Tangerine, which opened in select theaters on July 10. "I just wanted to tell my story, some of the things I had been through and some of the things I had seen out there," she says. Taylor tells Newsweek that she trusted Baker and Bergoch immediately, and was on-board for their project. In a recent interview with The Huffington Post, Taylor said she had applied to 186 jobs and had yet to find employment, a testament to the discrimination these women face, forcing some to resort to working the streets when the world doesn't offer them much else.
While Taylor was not and is not a sex worker, she had befriended transgender women and men working the area, and had been struggling to find employment after transitioning a few years ago. "It was basically this red light district less than a mile from my home, and was a world I was unfamiliar with," he says.īaker and his co-writer, Chris Bergoch, began hanging out in the area, and soon the pair met the illustrious Taylor, an aspiring performer, at the LGBT Center on McCadden Place. Seeing something that had been never captured on film, he sought to explore the area further. But what begins as a raucous journey to kick someone's ass descends into a thoughtful meditation on trust, friendship and the gruesome realities that accompany just trying to get by.ĭirector and co-writer Sean Baker, the brains behind well-received indie flicks including Starlet, Prince of Broadway and Take Out, used to live right around Tangerine's stomping grounds specifically, the corner of Santa Monica and Highland, L.A.'s unofficial hotbed of transgender sex work solicitation. A punishingly loud trap score rapping at their high heels, the pair prowl around a papaya-steeped Tinseltown in search of the woman, named Dinah (Mickey O'Hagan). Sin-Dee's just been sprung from jail and is celebrating her return with Alex-until she hears that her boyfriend/pimp Chester (James Ransone) has been cheating on her with a "real fish" (street-speak for a cisgender woman) during her brief stint behind bars. The film follows best friends Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), transgender prostitutes who traipse around Los Angeles's red light district on one rollicking Christmas Eve. That's not even taking into account the iPhone.
Sure, the photo quality is a smidge grainier than what you'd see from a DSLR, yet it's arguably one of most critical films to emerge from this generation. It's not technically the first flick made on the Apple product (2014's And Uneasy Lies the Mind nabs that prize), but the Sundance breakout stands out because its subject matter is beautifully transgressive. While video-sharing platforms like Vine and Instagram may already feel ubiquitous in our overexposed culture, consider that one of the most buzzed-about feature films of 2015, Tangerine, was shot entirely on an iPhone.
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