Hello, and welcome to Queer is Fiction, where we discuss queer media from around the world and throughout time.

I'm Jasmine. I'm Irene. I'm Alice.

And today we're discussing Sebastian Lelio's Academy Award-winning 2017 drama, A Fantastic Woman.

Before we get started, I'd like to acknowledge the Banuang Bruidwong people of the Kulin Nation

as the traditional owners of the land on which we record this podcast and pay respect to their elders past and present.

We recognize them as the custodians of an oral history tradition far older than this podcast.

We also have some content warnings for this episode. This

episode features discussion of brain aneurysms, death, the dead naming and misgendering

of a trans person, homophobia and transphobia, including violence from the community, medical

professionals and law enforcement, and sexual assault. If any of that sounds like something

you don't want to listen to, please check out our other content. I swear that most of my media episodes are not as heavy as this, and I saw

the TV glow. I feel like I say this every time, but this episode is going to be structured

a little differently to the usual queer as fiction episode. In this case, the reason is that

the release of this film and the awards it subsequently won, in particular,

the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in early 2018, were a catalyst for real-world

political change in its country of origin, Chile, and it would be weird to discuss the film

without focusing heavily on that. But I do first want to discuss the film as a work in and of itself,

and to get your reactions to its content, because I do think it has merit as a work of fiction in and of itself before we get to

what it led to in the real world.

That's quite exciting, because, like, obviously, me and I really know what's in the movie,

but I don't know anything about this political side of things, and, like, I knew there

were political ramifications, but I didn't know it was something that could be like, you know, understood as real political change for trans people in Chile.

...