In their award-winning feature directorial debut, Mickey, trans Mexican filmmaker Dano García explores the complexities of identity, vulnerability, and collective memory within a conservative environment. Centred on ten years of personal diary logs, digital archives, and webcam recordings belonging to multidisciplinary trans performer Mickey Cundapí (artistically known as Mis$ Mickey), the film examines the ways in which our relationships with our past can challenge our perceptions of who we are today.
We spoke to Dano about the inspiration behind the film, their approach to shaping an un-categorical structure like water, and the importance of finding authenticity and agency through trans cinema.
What first drew you to Mis$ Mickey’s story, and how did your relationship with Mickey develop as you began making the film?
I met Mickey when she was 11; she was dressed as a kitten, with makeup on her eyes. We both attended the same Catholic school, and her way of dressing scandalized the priests. It was the first time I had ever seen a trans girl truly being herself – especially considering that, in Mazatlán, the average age for coming out is around 30. Her free-spirited nature encouraged and inspired others to be themselves, too.
I also came out as a trans person during the process of making the film. That was when we moved into the same apartment and began a journey that would last 10 years.
The film uses play, art and childhood archives to explore memory. What interested you about those ways of looking back?
Mickey told me she had a poor memory – that she couldn’t recall many events from her past – so I suggested she start keeping a diary. Random thoughts, memories, wishes, and to-do lists ended up forming the structure of the film. Memory is not linear, and neither is the structure of this documentary. We felt that the very act of writing things down – putting pencil to paper – should dictate the intent of each scene; translating what was on the page into the final edit was a challenge, but it was well worth the ten-year wait.
Often, when considering the structure of a documentary with a trans theme, there is an assumption that hormonal transition is linear (male to female, female to male). Stories tend to focus on this -which isn’t necessarily a bad thing -but it reduces us to a binary experience. Transitioning has many different facets, and often involves a great deal of uncertainty. For me, transitioning is about desires – desires that act as an escape from social impositions and the expectations of how one “ought” to be- and about finally discovering yourself by being your true self. I wanted to hear Mickey’s dreams – many of them fleeting – and to use cinema as a tool for reinvention: a way to engage with the past by transforming it into a present characterized by agency.
How did you approach working with personal archives while making sure the film stayed rooted in Mickey’s own perspective?
The project also began in Mickey’s room; we were looking through her material when we started recording it with a webcam – a practice we ended up repeating for 10 years, whenever we could. We made many decisions that contradicted one another and kept shifting, but it was through those very decisions that we questioned what should – and shouldn’t – be included in the film.
That’s how we arrived at the decision to invite Mickey’s family to watch the documentary. I recorded their reactions and their thoughts on it. That was when we realized that many accounts didn’t align – and, more importantly, that the individuals involved failed to grasp the full gravity of their actions. For instance, there’s a scene where Mickey’s father recounts how he used to slip testosterone drops into Mickey’s smoothies without her knowledge. I asked him if he could act out that moment, and he agreed; I also asked what color he envisioned for the scene, and he said blue. I suggested that the drops themselves should be pink. To our surprise, right in the middle of the scene, he suddenly grasped the true nature of his actions – which finally opened the door for a confrontation about why he had done it. Mickey ended the exchange by revealing that those drops actually contained estrogen, not testosterone.
In this collective fractal of the past, my own experience was also woven in—not only through my involvement with the documentary, but also because I attended the same school as Mickey. Mickey suggested that my poems about the transition- since I also transitioned as a non-binary person during the filming- should be included in the movie.
The description of Mickey suggests a transformation of memory into liberation. Was that something you set out to explore from the beginning, or did it emerge as the film took shape?
I think it was a concept that evolved over the years; at first, we didn’t know what form the film would take- it took us a great deal of effort to figure that out! Then came the idea of a video game avatar that would navigate through Mickey’s memories. In a sense, it’s an exploration of a simulated world -reflecting on the role you play and how you create your avatar – which is one of the film’s unique features. Memory becomes an act of liberation once you reclaim agency over your own story.
The film is described as formally daring. Were there any creative choices you made that felt particularly exciting or challenging? What has making MICKEY taught you about the relationship between filmmaking, identity and self-expression?
I believe the decision to involve ourselves in the film – as creative agents who were simultaneously watching the film and editing it – was an intuitive choice that shaped the film’s direction. With this concept – taking on the role of a character in the film, or acting as the person writing the diary that shapes the film’s structure – the process becomes more challenging, more intuitive, and, above all, opens the door to experimentation. I perceive the film’s structure as being like water: it takes on a different form in every scene, dissolving any attempt at categorization.
What do you hope audiences take away from spending time with Mickey and the world of the film?
I hope that, through Mickey’s life, the joy of living—and the freedom to tell one’s own story, informed by the wisdom of one’s ancestors—can be shared and embraced. We need more trans cinema and cinema made by trans people.
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