Film Review

If You Would Understand What I’m Saying You Would Be  Human Trans

Knowing the experience of someone else is something that art can facilitate. Recalling what Alice said to her cat in the beginning of the film, if you would understand what I’m saying you would be human— maybe this film will even make someone who’s not a trans woman from South Korea understand a tiny bit of what it is to be a trans woman in South Korea, or maybe it will just show a glimpse of the lives of two specific, beautiful, hurting, loving, flawed, and infinitely important women.

“Village of Women”, Tamara Stepanyan and Minou Norouzi in conversation

That’s just the beginning of a feminist tale about the effects of migration set in the backwaters where no one considers themself feminist. Feminist lives, however, are lived. Even as we hear weary declarations about a husband’s absence, such as “he is the centre of my universe”, we witness scenes of coded liberalism. For example, a picnic gathering in the hills among three older women serves as a reminder of the empowerment these women, too, are capable of. In a campaign of laughter, they defend the actions of a sixty-year-old fellow villager losing her virginity in the mountains: “It’s a natural need. She has never experienced this in her life, the poor one (…) she wanted to know what it was.” But I want to leave aside the transnational feminist reading that the film inspires for now. Village of Women brings something more unique to the plethora of documentaries about migration. Namely, it turns the spectacle of migration on its head by avoiding the topic altogether.