A number of intersex people around the world were interviewed by New Zealand film director Grant Lahood for his documentary Intersexion including a member of OII Australia, Gina Wilson.

We welcome TV One’s commissioning of this film and are grateful to Mr Lahood for creating it in collaboration with Mani Mitchell of Wellington, New Zealand.

Mani Mitchell comments:

“I hope this documentary will show everyone that the ‘shame and secrecy’ model hasn’t worked – and that intersex children can grow up to make informed choices about their own bodies,” Mitchell says.

Intersexion will screen on Sunday 10th July at 10.40 pm on TV One.

Power relations & turning the tables on tradition

TRADITIONAL documentary filmmaking sets the “objective” observational filmmaker against the self-involved subject who is depicted as a suffering fellow human on the other side of the glass. “I am human too,” say the depicted as they plead to their oppressors to be treated as such.

We also recommend these stories, by intersex people

That all changed quite recently with two autobiographical documentaries made by accomplished filmmakers of transsexual background, Gwen Haworth and Kimberly Reed. Both films embed the filmmakers’s stories within their families and hometowns.

Reed’s Prodigal Sons takes her from New York back to Montana and also investigates a longstanding family mystery involving her adopted brother and his own natal family background.

Haworth’s She’s A Boy I Knew records dialogs between the filmmaker and members of her family. Neither film depicts the filmmakers as abject, suffering victims and shed a very different, far more empowered light on their subjects.

Phoebe Hart’s autobiographical film Orchids about her and her sister Bonnie applies a similar approach to being intersex.