$15 sliding scale tickets

This project’s first phase is Eve Fowler’s 16mm short film, Florence Derive (pictured here at Gordon Robichaux exhibition, 2023) in which the artist recounts being a gender expansive ten-year-old who becomes the object of a school teacher’s “boundless hate.” Sustained abuse causes a profound character shift that triggers illness, and she is eventually expelled from school. From this root wound, she finds solace, community, and herself in the arts to become the powerful femme with an easy smile and a critical eye that sits gazing directly into Fowler’s camera.

Filles Manquées is a subsequent film that employs empathic witnessing to tell the many stories of eighty year old French trans artist Florence Derive. She sits before Fowler on the metro, in her home or moves through the city witnessing one another, she recounts her arrival to Paris, her loves, radical historical moments, art school, working life and transition – we listen. We trace together the spaces around Paris that make up her creative and emotional lives.

In Filles Manquées, a queer artist and lifelong artist in her sixties turns her camera and the tenderness of her gaze on the eighty year old French trans artist Florence Derive. This film sees queer trans elders in a culture that would have us have none. It witnesses as a form of care and privileges the trans femme body as a way-maker of resistance to patriarchal violence that would cow us into believing there is only one way to live or be.

Become a member for $13/month to access all HRLA events including this summer’s Cinema Land screenings!