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At an early point in “What Will I Become?,” co-director Logan Rozos explains to the camera, “We are not taken seriously, so we have to take ourselves very seriously.” The film he has made, with Lexie Bean, tackles the crisis
of transmasculine suicide head-on, while adding specificity and poignant remembrance. Though it mostly avoids being a PSA, some statistics have to be mentioned when more than 50% of transmasculine boys attempt suicide. This documentary, through the personal experience of the filmmakers, tries to answer the question of why. Having premiered at the Berlinale in February and screened at last week’s BlackStar festival, it deserves to find a larger audience outside the fest circuit.
Both Bean and Rozos appear copiously on screen and talk about their struggles with coming out and being accepted as trans. However, they avoid making the film about themselves by highlighting the experience of two other young men, Blake Brockington and Kyler Prescott. Brockington appears in a lot of archival footage, including an interview where he tells his story in his own words. The filmmakers supplement that with scenes where an actor reads from Brockington’s diaries and poetry, giving the audience a full portrait of this protagonist.
In 2014, Brockington ran for and won the Prom King title at his North Carolina high school — becoming an inspiration for many transmasculine teenagers, including the filmmakers, at the time. He also faced a abuse and transphobia, both online and off, as a result. The filmmakers sensitively tell this story of unbridled hope followed by despair. They let Brockington take center stage finally and insert themselves only sparingly. They show his impact on his friends, teachers, mentors and people he never met. These are the strongest passages of the film: Brockington’s voice is persuasive and the film renders it vividly.
They have less footage of Prescott — he appears mostly in photos, and one archival sequence where he plays the piano — so his story is told through his parents. Now divorced, they appear on camera to describe their experience with open vulnerability, from confusion to hope to grief. In these sequences, “What Will I Become?” becomes a story of how even the most understanding and supportive family cannot undo the harm inflicted by institutions and systems that are governed by policies and traditions that do not allow for visible trans expression.
Prescott’s story is both a rallying cry and a tragic narrative full of sorrow. Yet the filmmakers infuse it with levity, showing his love and affinity for animals, as well ashis musical talents. His parents don’t just talk about their heartbreak in losing their son, but also about him as a singular person who held much promise and brought joy to their lives.
While the filmmakers should be commended for keeping the focus on Brockington and Prescott for most of the running time, the doc also feels somewhat unbalanced. Why start with themselves and appear on screen if they are only telling snippets of their story? They appear together in conversation, sitting under a sheath tent inside a room. The image is whimsical, belying their instinct to flee the harsh world outside that tent, and through it, the audience gets to understand their psyche and innermost thoughts.
In conversation, however, they remain reticent — which is understandable, given the emotional weight of what they have been through, but contrasts with how forthright Brockington and Prescott’s parents are. They introduce another protagonist, Akewele, but he quickly disappears; his short segment seems to be included to raise awareness about a trans hotline service. It’s an odd choice beside the beautifully rendered stories of Brockington and Prescott.
“What Will I Become?” resists the impulse to turn its subjects into symbols and instead lingers on the particularities of who they were — via Brockington’s words, Prescott’s music, the memories of friends and parents. These details complicate the statistics that necessarily surround the film and make the losses feel less abstract. If the filmmakers are less certain when they place themselves at the center, perhaps that’s because their own stories remain deliberately unfinished while Brockington and Prescott’s have already been cut short. Still, that tension gives the film much of its emotional and intellectual force. It is a film about suicide, but also about the conditions that make certain lives feel precarious, about the limits of individual resilience and about what remains of a person in the memories of those who loved them.
