Creating a Trans Cinema: Louise Weard on Castration Movie

In October 2024, Weird Weekend, Glasgow’s festival of obscure and outsider cinema, hosted Louise Weard for the world theatrical premiere of her debut feature, Castration Movie Anthology I: The Fear Of Having No One To Hold At The End Of The World. The four-and-a-half hour epic, shot entirely on a Hi8 camcorder, concerns two tales set in Vancouver. The first, Incel Superman, follows internet troll Turner (Noah Baker), who spirals further and further down the 4chan rabbithole in a cringe comedy fairytale; and the second concerns Traps, a politically incorrect and foul-mouthed sex worker, played by the director.

In person, Weard is affable, erudite, and completely unlike the character she wrote for herself, but what she does share with Traps is familiar to many trans people: experiences of life on the margins. “I was couchsurfing with my friends or living out of my car, selling my stuff on Facebook Marketplace to afford gas – but I had my parents' old video camera on me. I loved seeing myself as a kid, how I would hold it, how I would interact with people and spaces.” She brought the AV antique along to her friends’ gig at a DIY punk venue. The crowd scene she captured was the first footage that would make its way into Castration Movie, which she began to produce with the bandmates, Aoife Josie Clemens and Magda Baker.

After getting a day job as a set PA, Weard was free to spend weekends filming her friends, putting together a sprawling, slice-of-life story. From the start, she wanted her script to use unconventional narratives that tied together in unexpected ways. “I want the audience to be thinking of Joyce’s Dubliners,” she says, “but I think, by the end, they’re going to be thinking more of Infinite Jest.” When work dried up during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, a Canadian arts grant and an internet fundraiser pushed Anthology I over the finishing line. But Castration Movie is far from over: this October sees the online premier of Anthology II: The Best of Both Worlds.

“I wanted to make the scariest trans girl horror film,” explains Weard. The sole story of Anthology II revolves around Circle (Alex Walton), the newest initiate of an emotionally dysfunctional, sexually co-dependent polycule of trans women, kept as a doomsday cult in the basement of a corrupt YouTuber. The claustrophobic thriller contains five hours of overstimulating parties, excessive amounts of hot dogs, and grotesque rituals, often delivered in a dialogue of internet-pilled, brain-rotted discourse. “I basically had to start a cult, bring eight people down into a basement, get them to completely lose their own personality and take on another, and then say go.” Two core questions defined the project: “What if community can’t help you?” and “What if the way we talked about each other on Twitter was real life?”

The Best of Both Worlds eventually takes the viewer to the surface, showing that real life is just as inhospitable to trans women. In the basement, the situationship from hell was inspired by a Cronenbergian fusion of humanity and technology, while above ground, Weard was looking at other nighttime thrillers set in NYC, like Taxi Driver or The Driller Killer.

In fact, the director’s influences for the overarching project include Third Cinema, a 1960s concept encompassing films from outside the Western or Soviet systems, usually from countries in South America, Africa or Asia – like the Argentine political documentary The Hour of the Furnaces, which had to be exhibited underground because of its anticapitalist subject matter. Screenings of Castration Movie, like the one at Weird Weekend, can physically bring together a community. “You watch it, you take an intermission, you chat about it, you watch the rest, and everyone gets to talk, and think about their place in this modern political reality, and hopefully feel some degree of anger, or inspiration, or empathy.” 

The Best of Both Worlds was also filmed in New York to platform the American trans community in particular, following the re-election of Donald Trump. Weard’s goal to “create a trans cinema… by, for, and about trans people” is coming to fruition – Anthology III, set to release in 2026, features cameos and contributions from trans artists like Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw The TV Glow), Vera Drew (The People’s Joker), and Alison Rumfitt (Brainwyrms). 

And though Trump is across the Atlantic, the UK’s queer community has suffered under a botched medical report and subsequent Supreme Court ruling. “If I could come up with a cool idea, I’d love to tap into the same stuff going on in the UK and give people on the ground there an outlet, to just fucking be mad,” says Weard. But catharsis is just one goal of many in her framework for trans cinema. “It doesn’t matter what country I’m in, what city, what area, rural or urban, trans communities laugh at the same jokes, they relate to the same things. I made a movie that was so specific about the people I know in Vancouver, and it branched out so much.”

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Castration Movie Part II is released in cinemas from 10 Oct by Matchbox Cine, and Parts I and II will be available on-demand via Matchbox Cine's online platform from 1 Oct
watch.eventive.org/matchboxcine