I reviewed Donna, Jay Bedwani’s documentary about trans artist and activist Donna Personna, for Sight & Sound, and found it very moving and effective. Here’s the opening of the review:
“My favourite word is ‘persistence’,” says Donna Personna, the eponymous subject of Jay Bedwani’s documentary, while perusing an inspirational quote on a colleague’s wall. At that moment, she is talking about her hopes of finding a mass audience for her cabaret work, though she’s under no illusions about the modest extent of her formal talents. There’s much more at play here, however. Now 75, Donna is a late-blossoming, relatively new turn on the San Francisco performance scene. That’s one kind of persistence. She’s also trans and, though conscious from childhood of her non-normative identity, has been publicly living her gender only from the age of 59. Over the past decade, Donna has evidently nurtured highly substantive forms of self-actualisation, friendship, and cultural and political agency. And, as Bedwani’s film documents, she is engaged in complex and reflexive projects of engagement with her past, on both intimately personal and broadly structural levels. Donna is the story, then, of the successful third act of a trans life – something that still constitutes a triumph in itself…”
You can read the whole review at the Sight & Sound website here.
