When Louise Weard began shooting her debut film in 2023, she envisaged it as a snappy, 90-minute portrait of a group of queer and transgender friends in Vancouver. Now, Castration Movie, a crowdfunded camcorder epic made for less than C$60,000 (£33,000), runs four-and-a-half hours. And that’s just part one. When the entire magnum opus is finished later this year, Weard estimates it will clock in at more than 12 hours. Take that, Béla Tarr. Watch your back, Rivette.
Not that anyone could mistake Castration Movie for slow cinema. “It’s not as if I’m asking you to watch farmers in a field for 20 minutes,” says the 31-year-old director over coffee in an east London cafe. Indeed not: the first hour-and-a-half follows a budding “incel” as he sinks deeper into the manosphere. The narrative focus then switches abruptly to a trans sex worker, Michaela “Traps” Sinclair, played by Weard. Michaela’s abrasive exterior conceals a yearning for motherhood and intimacy; she may have the tongue of Joan Rivers and the decorum of Divine, but she’s as fragile as Edith Piaf. “People are always relieved when they find out I’m nothing like Michaela,” says Weard, whose background is in Canadian underground horror. “She’s the nightmare version of me.”
The film mixes Cassavetes-level rawness, a dazed Warholian languor and quotable banter worthy of Kevin Smith, including a nutty conversation about Dune, as well as a morbid Tinder date that gives maximum cringe. With its scenes of unsimulated sex, water-sports, self-harm (Weard is seen stubbing out a cigarette on her thigh) and the graphic aftermath of surgery, Castration Movie’s list of trigger warnings is longer than some films’ scripts.
It’s all shot with the same handheld Hi8 camera on which Weard’s parents filmed home movies when she was growing up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She digs it out from her bag and passes it across the table. “Go ahead, play with the zoom,” she says. “You get a clean image where you can see the micro-expressions of what someone’s thinking.” Obeying those instructions, I crash-zoom on to an extreme closeup of her. Dressed in a white blouse with blonde hair pulled back, a silver nose-ring and shrewd eyes behind dainty glasses, she is a dead ringer for the sardonic 22 Jump Street star Jillian Bell.
Many of the scenes in Castration Movie push incidents from Weard’s own life to imagined extremes. One episode in the second instalment shows a woman reacting with horror when her skateboarder partner comes out as trans and asks to be called Tiffany. “I came out when I was 27,” says Weard. “I was in the middle of doing the dishes. My girlfriend at the time was an angel, so supportive and excited for me. But the film takes real-life situations and asks: what are the worst intrusive thoughts you could have in this moment? What’s the worst possible outcome?”
From this emerges its purpose: to coax audiences into empathising with characters who are their moral, ideological and political opposites. “Castration Movie has been hailed as this important trans work,” says Weard, who cast fellow trans directors Vera Drew (The People’s Joker) and Alice Maio Mackay (T Blockers) in the film;Lilly Wachowski, co-creator of the Matrix franchise, also contributed to the crowdfunding campaign. “Then the movie opens and you don’t see a single trans person on screen for the first 90 minutes.”
There is a logic to such seemingly perverse choices. “Each chapter is training the audience how to watch the next section,” she says. “Seeing this cis guy experience gender failure, you learn the beats of his story and you can apply them to Michaela, too. What I’m saying on a deeper level is that there are those at the margins who we don’t want to think about, but who are the same as us. We’re all people, right? We all share some universal experience of what it means to be human. In part two, there is a Terf and a detransitioner and an adult baby diaper lover. I want to show the shared humanity between them. They’re all a part of me. I even gave the incel my old name.”
The picture’s leap in scale from thumbnail sketch to vast fresco occurred early on. Weard was showing a producer friend the scene in which a trans man on the eve of having top surgery is eulogising the breasts that have served him well, giving thanks for all the free beers and smokes that came his way because of them. “I was fast-forwarding through the footage and my friend was, like: ‘Louise,stop. I want to watch the whole thing.’ When it was over, he said: ‘You’re not allowed to cut a fucking second of this.’ I pointed out that if I didn’t, this was going to be a 12-hour movie.’ And he said: ‘Well then, I guess you’re making a 12-hour movie.’”
That noun is key. “Calling it CastrationMovieundercuts the intimidation of the running time,” she reasons. “This isn’t a film. This is definitely amovie.” The crowds who have been cramming into clubs and basements to watch it, hunkering down in beanbag chairs and ordering pizza during the intermissions, seem to agree. “People tell me afterwards that it was the hardest they’ve ever laughed in a movie and the hardest they’ve ever cried. I want to keep that going. I’d love people to also feel it was the most turned on they’ve ever felt while watching a movie. Or the angriest.”
Her hopes that the picture will have crossover appeal are not unrealistic. “In New York, we’d have, like, 100 trans women showing up to watch it together,” she says. “That never happens. Some of these girls aren’t leaving their house to do anything else that’s community-oriented. But I don’t think the movie will alienate viewers who aren’t part of that, so now it’s going out to a broader audience.” Having been seen in the UK in festival or club settings, it will play next month at the Prince Charles Cinema in London – not in the venue’s queer strand but as part of its Bleak Week season alongside such diverse titles as Trainspotting, There Will Be Blood and Watership Down.
And there is always the laptop option. The movie was released initially as a pay-what-you-like download with a C$1.50 minimum fee, and continues to be available in that format. Why? “Because it should be!” Weard says blithely. “I want people to see it. I’ll have a message from someone in Brazil who can’t afford the dollar, and if they reach out I send them a free link. People in Ukraine tell me the movie means a lot to them. A trans woman in Hong Kong said it reminded her of her friends. It’s crazy to have made something so hyperspecific to my experience and to find people around the world laughing at the same jokes.”
Her concern now is what will happen once she puts Castration Movie to bed. “What do I do next? I joked with a friend about getting a job doing Hallmark Christmas movies from now on. Because where else can I go after my 12-hour masterpiece?”
Castration Movie is screening in the UK and Ireland in May and June. Detailshere. It is available to downloadhere.