Markie in Milwaukee

(USA / 2020 / Directed by Matt Kliegman)

An inspired documentary with a fascinating subject at its center, Markie in Milwaukee follows the life of a 7-foot-tall fundamentalist minister who makes the decision at age 46 to come out as a transgender woman. This decision ends her 20-year marriage, estranges her from her three children, and dismisses her from her church. When she begins to question her transition as a result, Kliegman’s film emerges as a fascinating meditation on the very meaning of “identity” to someone who has long felt discouraged from expressing who they are.

We meet Markie in 2008 as she is putting the pieces of her life back together, employed as a TSA agent and working toward her goal of sexual reassignment surgery. But over the course of the next decade, Markie begins to question her path. She misses the births of her grandchildren, struggles to present as feminine, and starts to re-evaluate her faith. On the eve of her gender reassignment surgery, she must decide for good whether to abandon her female identity and return to living as Mark, for whom life seemed so much easier.

With over 10 years of vérité footage paired with contemporaneous interviews, filmmaker Matt Kliegman approaches the film with a Diane Arbus-like observational style that is at once intimate and voyeuristic, tragic and hopeful. Markie’s aim is simple: to be a good person and lead a simple devout life. But her struggles are emblematic of a larger conversation rooted in our country's fixation on identity — whether political, spiritual or personal — and the fear of those who don’t fit neatly within their own communities.

Unrated / 1 hr 32 mins.