A New Cinematic Language for Trans Life

Chris Shields speaks with filmmaker Louise Weard about her ‘Castration Movie’ series.

By Chris ShieldsJanuary 10, 2026

• Film

• Gender & Sexuality

IN LOUISE WEARD’S Castration Movie part i. Traps, a trans sex worker, the lovably daffy protagonist of the film’s second chapter, is giving a blow job. The scene is filmed with a camcorder, and in the middle of the somewhat banal sex act, the camera, on the ground, is kicked, sliding across the floor mid-shot. It’s a simple act that’s also wildly complex on a formal and semiotic level. This scene, and this particular moment, is an integral part of Weard’s mission to create a new cinematic language for trans life, one that comes not from without but from within—a “third-gender” cinema, in her words.

The Castration Movie series has been gaining notoriety among online cinephiles, garnering praise on sites like Letterboxd. This is perfect for Weard, whose work courts conversation, be it chats after the many screenings the film is currently enjoying around the world or more caustic online discourse. The ramshackle, naturalistic films Weard is releasing crackle with a startling immediacy, capturing the present moment in a way that feels sociopolitically critical. Focusing a tight lens on a vulnerable community of young people, her work is part of a growing trans vanguard that includes Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker (2022) and Elizabeth Purchell’s company Muscle Distribution. Like them, Weard is synthesizing humor, formal radicality, and a DIY ethos into a new kind of queer cinema.

With the first two parts of the series clocking in at a staggering 10 hours, Weard is preparing to release the third installment of Castration Movie Anthology later this year. And many viewers, including me, are eagerly waiting.

¤

CHRIS SHIELDS: Tell me about the background to Castration Movie.

LOUISE WEARD: I released a short film called Computer Hearts that I made when I was 19. It didn’t get into any festivals, so I took it straight online. I was shilling the movie through Letterboxd when that site was brand-new, trying to get people to review it and watch it, just trying to get the movie promoted. And the movie was not received well. That was a bit of a bruise to my ego, so I committed instead to being the best cheerleader I could for all of my friends who were making movies. I moved into cinematography or sound recording or producing. I did that for about 10 years. I had a huge output of work, just not anything as a director.

I think it was after I transitioned in 2020 that I was suddenly feeling hungry to get back into it. Castration Movie started production in December 2022. In the year leading up to that, I had published some writing on castration in exploitation films in a book on queer cinema, and I did a show about castration at Fantastic Fest. Then the movie I made when I was 19 was finally getting reassessed as this sort of interesting, queer techno-horror movie. So all of a sudden, the universe was telling me to make another movie.

What are some of the formal and stylistic inspirations for Castration Movie?

I was very inspired by the mumblecore movement because that was just at its peak when I first started making things. I was looking back and going, How can I take the things I like with the gift of hindsight and lift from them, from Dogma 95, from these things I really quite enjoy, but update them into something that’s very new and prescient in the way we engage with art through the internet, that works with a very contemporary cultural zeitgeist? I was also reading a lot of trans literature and internalizing the minutiae of how those great storytellers shaped a structural framework for trans narratives. I read Remy Boydell’s The Pervert immediately before I started shooting. And so it was wrapping all of these ideas together, socially, philosophically, and formally. Castration Movie is a kitchen-sink project of everything I’ve been thinking about the last 10 years and wanting to put into a movie.

Can you talk about the title and the massive length of the films?

It was funny because when I wrote the treatment I thought, Okay, I’m going to try to make sure this is 80 minutes long. I’d already done about two months of shooting on Castration Movie and I was hanging out in Chicago with my friend William Morris. We sat down and started watching the footage together. And all of a sudden, Will was just like, “Oh my God, this is so good. Don’t skip anything. I want to watch this full hour you’ve shot.” So we watched all of that and then he just said, “You can’t cut any of this.” And I was like, “Dude, the movie’s going to be six-plus hours long.” And he said, “Well, Louise, you’re making a six-plus-hour movie, I guess.” So now, we’re already over 10 hours. So it just keeps going. I did miss the 80-minute mark I initially was aiming for, but audiences are willing to watch something that long. And it’s also the way I like to watch stuff. I love a long video essay on YouTube or watching a miniseries on streaming.

And the title?

The title kind of came from a joke, in a way. The short films I had made when I was like 19, 20 years old both had scenes where I as the actor got castrated as the big final climactic image of the movie. And then, as I said, I had written an article on castration in exploitation film for a queer book of film theory, and then I also had done that show at Fantastic Fest that was all about dick mutilation scenes in movies. Then I was at Sundance in 2023, and I was at some party talking to a reporter who wrote for Vulture and we were just shooting the shit and having a good time. I was talking about some of the projects I really wanted to do that included a book adaptation. And I was talking about what at the time was just the untitled Louise Weard movie. So she asked me, “Oh, hey, I’m doing like a little write-up every day I’m at Sundance. Can I include something about our conversation?” I had gone on about trans cinema and queer cinema and all this stuff, but of course I also talked about the castration show at Fantastic Fest, these other short films I had made, and this new project I was working on.

When the article came out the following day recapping the day at Sundance, it was so funny because all she wrote about was the castration stuff. So I kind of was like, Oh well, I can do whatever I want to in terms of the industry but people are going to notice the castration thing because it sticks out. I mean, especially as a trans woman filmmaker, it gets some attention, right? Almost like reclaiming this sort of joke or something. So it was like, Well, I guess I’m making a castration movie. Even though there’s not really literal castration in the film—it’s all very metaphorical. It’s very figurative. But it’s just so funny because that obviously helped it to stand out. You don’t have to fix what’s already working.

What, if anything, is your scripting process like?

There are no scripts. I was trying to think of the things that slowed me down on other projects I had done over the last 10 years, and I thought, you know, Why be slavish to a screenplay? So much of the media we’re consuming online has this sort of off-the-cuff, natural quality, so I wanted something that feels like we’re capturing real life. Rather than having an actor try to recall something that makes it, you know, a very predictive approach to acting, I wanted something that was very reactive. There’s something that makes a performance so natural in seeing an actor who has to think about what they’re going to say, because that’s the way people operate. Especially when trying to unpack the queer film images, I wanted to tackle something that felt so uncinematic, because I didn’t want to reiterate what I call a tourist gaze around trans bodies—like Dallas Buyers Club or something. You’re seeing Jared Leto in this very specific way that’s meant to speak to a non-trans audience and express something to them. And I didn’t want to be reiterating that, because if I’m deconstructing something, I want to take a fully oppositional approach.

So I said, “Fuck this tourist gaze, we’re instead going to create a new gaze from scratch. I’m not trying to rely on a cinematic language that has failed people from my demographic for the history of cinema.” So starting from that place, a semiotic place, I suddenly wanted to think about what is the practicality of this. The script that exists started in my Notes app and then migrated into a Google Sheet, where I just listed every scene, what was important about that scene, and what characters were in that scene. I basically had a map, but I wouldn’t share this with anyone else on the team. I would just take a kind of oral storytelling approach, where I would sit down with the cast or whoever was filming and we would all just talk through the scene together.

Part of the reason the movie plays long is because we allow these scenes to build in a natural way. I consider it a sort of experimental film in that regard, because it’s definitely quite different from how you’re supposed to approach filmmaking with a lot of structure. There’s a sort of anti-structural quality. It’s more like shooting a home video. Even though there is a lot of preparation that goes into every scene, I don’t want anyone to feel that as they’re watching it. I want it to feel quite natural. The magic trick only works if people forget they’re watching a movie.

The films are also very funny. How do you balance the moments of despair with the humor?

I think it’s just because life’s funny. I think about the movie as very similar to if I’m in a room and I’m telling a good anecdote. Even if it’s the most tragic story, I’m trying to find a layer of comedy in there because I think that’s what people connect to best, that balance of humor and tragedy that creates the pathos of the situation.

When we started shooting one of the first scenes for chapter one, with the incel character and his girlfriend in bed together, he says that he doesn’t know how to define love in a relationship, and she’s kind of taken aback, which was something that I wrote from an experience I had. I started from this thing that was an awkward situation. I said, “Okay, well what if I took that and pushed it where both me and my partner said every intrusive thought we had and really interrogated this thing?” In reality it was quickly resolved, but instead we’re going to make it a five-minute scene in a movie. And the effect of that is actually quite funny because you’re seeing a reflection of something that you would hope you would never do.

I think of Castration Movie as a horror film of language. Hearing the way people talk to each other, I want that to feel like violence. Or it’s like, can I make gore but out of cringe situations?

Can you talk about working with Vera Drew and the sort of vanguard of trans cinema you two are part of?

Vera’s one of my best friends in the entire world. I was screening for South by Southwest and Fantastic Fest, and the screener for People’s Joker came across my radar and I had nothing but great things to say about it. I really pushed for us to screen it at Fantastic Fest, and the rest of the programming team was excited about it. Then obviously, you know, there was a lot of drama around the initial festival run of that movie, but Vera still came to Fantastic Fest, and we became fast friends. It was Vera, Liz Purchell, and myself together at that festival, and it was like the first time I’d ever gone to a film festival and been like, “Oh my God, there’s other trans people around, and we’re kind of the vanguard,” as you said. And it was like, “We’re here, we’re doing it.” I started shooting Castration Movie maybe a month or two after we were hanging out. So I think I must have messaged her the second we started, saying like, “Hey, I’ve got a character for you.”

I look around at this amazing, fruitful community of trans artists, not just in film but also in other media. I work with all these trans musicians, so I’m bringing them in to act in the movie as well. There’s this big group of amazing artists who, for whatever reason, aren’t already so big that they’re outside my orbit—I can shoot them a quick message and say, “Hey, do you want to be involved in this project?”

There’s a reportage dimension to the film. The second film starts with footage of Trump. Like many of the greatest formal or experimental films, it is both document and pure art. Can you talk about keeping it in the contemporary moment?

A lot of that comes out of the fact that I’m shooting it over such a long time, and it is taking place in the here and now in the real world, so it’s easy to keep stuff in the conversation with the social-cultural-political landscape. On its surface, it’s a very political movie. I am approaching it the same way Third Cinemas of the 1960s and ’70s would, someone like Gillo Pontecorvo or a movie like The Hour of the Furnaces. These very direct political movies were meant to be watched with people from a certain demographic and then discussed. That’s definitely where I’m stealing some inspiration in terms of what I think these movies are. And so it’s kind of baked into the DNA of taking what I call a “third-gender approach” to cinema.

We shot Castration Movie part ii in July 2025, and it was released at the beginning of September. The time from when we shot it to the first screening was like a month and a half. The way we’re approaching these movies and allowing them to be rough—I’m running around with a consumer camcorder and doing these long takes and all these things where the language of the filmmaking is so immediate that we can finish these films quickly and have them out. I would say the other big thing is I don’t rein in my collaborators. If they want to take something pulled out of modern pop culture or something like that, I allow a degree of curation with it that’s very collaborative.

And how do you encourage your performers?

When we did the second one, I wanted it to feel a lot more like existing online. Like Twitter coming to life. So I encouraged the actors and said, “If you want to pull a meme into your dialogue or directly reference pop culture stuff, I’m not going to shut that down.”

And the Trump footage?

With the Trump footage at the start, the second the inauguration started, I pulled out my Handycam and I was like, I know there’s going to be something in here about trans rights. I’m just gonna start filming my TV and I’ll know if there’s something usable out of this once we get into postproduction. I had that footage in my back pocket.

I’m trying to make movies that people really want to hash out and have a discourse about. Obviously, a cinephile audience is going to approach them as these big, durational works. They’re like, Oh, that’s like a trans Lav Diaz movie or something. But I think, in terms of the themes, I want to feel like I’m playing with dynamite in a way, where you have these really terrible characters on-screen and then I ask my audience to sympathize with them to such an extreme degree. I’m really testing this idea of cinema as an empathy machine and trying to focus it on characters whom, you know, if you just saw them posting on Reddit or something, you’d be like, God, I wish that person would kill themselves and leave me alone. I’m trying to be like, Okay, I’m going to give you five hours with this person so you understand them as a full human being.

¤

Both installments of Castration Movie will be screening this weekend at Brain Dead Studios in Los Angeles: part i. on Saturday, January 10, and part ii. on Sunday, January 11.

¤

Louise Weard is a director with a degree in film semiotics.

¤

Featured image: Still from Castration Movie part ii. The Best of Both Worlds (2025), courtesy of Louise Weard.