The 3rd Netherlands Transgender Filmfestival
May 18-22, 2005
De Balie, Amsterdam

The programme is now online: www.transgenderfilmfestival.com

T-Image Foundation presents in collaboration with Cinema de Balie the
Netherlands Transgender Filmfestival from May 18 -22 in Amsterdam.
For the third
time, De Balie will be the festival's hot spot for celebration of
gender diversity
and the freedom of gender expressions. The festival will celebrate its own
Dutch-Canadian connection in the Transcanadian programme.

The festival is honoured to kick off the biggest transgender event in the
Netherlands with the feature Transamerica, a touching and acclaimed
road movie by
Duncan Tucker about a transgender woman who is pulled into an unexpected
travel adventure when she found out that she has a long lost son who
is looking
for his long lost dad. Starring Felicity Huffman (Desperate
Housewives) and the
young upcoming actor Kevin Zegers.

Other titles in our Main Programe are Asia Argento's adaptation of The Heart
is Deceitful above all Things, a heartbreaking tale of young Jeremy who's
dragged into the unstable world of drugs, abuse and truck stops tricks of his
mother Sarah, based on the second novel of cult author J.T. Leroy;
Melancholic and
poetic is the Taiwanese feature Splendid Float by Zero Chow about a Taoist
priest who's also the star of a drag queen band and Agnes und seine
Brüder, the
over-the-top tragicomedy by Oskar Roehler.

A special focus on Canadian productions can be found in the Transcanadian
programme; Drew Dennis of Vancouver's Out on Screen: Queer Film &
Video Festival
curated the shorts programme which highlight the up and coming genderqueer
movement; media artist Ivan E. Coyote will give a spoken word
performance at the
festival.

The programme Trans 'n' Sports focuses on the effects of gender segregation
in the world of professional sport. With screening of Karen Duthie's
100% Woman
, a documentary on Canadian national champion downhill mountain biker Michelle
Dumaresq, and Kurt Mayer's film Erik(A) on Erik Schinegger, who looks back at
the tumult in 1967 when he was Erika Schinegger, the world champion downhill
skiing who was tested as intersex by the IOC's gender test and was forced to
give up her successful professional career as an athlete.

Using music to tell extraordinary stories, the Sound of Transformation
programme contains films about talented musicians such as Venus in
Emily Goldberg's
Venus of Mars, the transgender glam-punkrocker from All the Pretty Horses, and
the Scottish singer-songwriter Simon de Voil in Travis Reeves' Funny Kinda Guy
; the unconventional 100% Human uses the aesthetic of music video to express
the pain and sorrows of the transition of a transgender youth.

The theme of female versus transgender masculinity is explored in the shorts
programme The Man in Us; being transgender at school is the main theme of the
youth programme It's not in a Game!, a showcase shorts and TV programmes made
on transgender youth dealing with school situations, like Nadav Gal's A
Different War, the Swedish En kille som jag/ Being a Boy by Mia
Olsson, and episodes
from daring youth TV programmes like Gemma Glitter and Jong!

The NTGF has always offered more than screenings: research on transgender
history will be presented in the Mapping our History programme; the Canadian
scholar Viviane Namaste will give an entertaining lecture on the historical
context for transsexual artists in Montréal in That was Showbusiness!
Furthermore,
the festival is honoured to screen the sneak preview of Victor Silverman and
Susan Stryker's historical documentary Screaming Queens, about an unknown but
important riot in 1966 which sparked off the transgender movement in San
Francisco. The festival is host to the Belgium art and historical
documentation
project Planet Gender, an ongoing project in which Estelle Slegers
and photographer
Marc de Clerq collect oral histories from the gender variant communities in
the Netherlands and Belgium.

The festival audience will be treated with another edition of our popular
experimental shorts programme T-Shorts #3, including animation films as Drive
Thru, Helpline!, Bikini but also the dry-humored satire Paszta
Cowboy , A: Gender
and many more.

The programme is now online: www.transgenderfilmfestival.com

Press information:
For more press information on the festival and high resolution photo stills,
please contact Jac Paul Spaas on e-mail: spaas@transgenderfilmfestival.com

Festival location: Cultural Centre de Balie, Kleine-Gartmansplantsoen 10,
Amsterdam.

Sponsors: VSB Fonds, Hivos, Stichting Thuiskopie Fonds, Beeld en Geluid en de
Canada Council of the Arts. T-Image Foundation is a non-profit organisation
that aims to challenge media representation of transgender people by
organising
cultural and educational events.

Netherlands Transgender Filmfestival, c/o T-Image Foundation, P.O. Box 15650,
1001 ND, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. E-mail:
contactus@transgenderfilmfestival.com