At TIFF 2025, Alex discusses the Iranian film Between Dreams and Hope about a trans man seeking gender affirming care, and connects this to other recent international films about the legal and medical barriers for the queer right to exist.
At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, I watched Between Dreams and Hope, a powerful new film about a trans man in Iran navigating the bureaucratic maze of gender-affirming care. Early scenes of everyday intimacy give way to the dehumanizing demands of the state: medical boards, virginity tests, and the requirement of his estranged father’s consent.
I’ve actually been thinking for a long time about how legal systems and bureaucracies don’t just sit in the background of queer and trans lives, but actively influence, impact, and sometimes control them. Between Dreams and Hope became a jumping-off point to talk about that lens — one I’d already been using while watching other recent films, like:
That train of thought took me to two other recent films:
- I Don’t Know Who You Are (Canada, 2023) — a story about a gay man navigating Canada’s healthcare system after a sexual assault, trying to access post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP). The film shows how class, cost, and shame collide when access to potentially life-saving medication is on the line.
- Love Letters / Les preuves d’amour (France, 2023) — Alice Douard’s debut feature, set in 2013, about a queer woman required to collect 15 “proofs of love” letters in order to legally adopt her partner’s biological child. Even with privilege on her side, the indignity of asking family, friends, and straight people to vouch for her legitimacy reveals just how unequal the law was — not so long ago.
Together, these films reveal different ways that patriarchy, bureaucracy, and class shape queer and trans survival. And while each one slightly simplifies a complex reality, they also spark curiosity: they make us look up policies we didn’t know about, notice the ways systems govern people’s lives, and resist the erasure of stories that might otherwise be forgotten.
✨ Living Out Loud Summit
If this conversation resonates with you, I’d love to invite you to Living Out Loud, a FREE three-day live online event happening in October. It’s all about queer and trans stories and queer and trans history — the stories that don’t usually get told, what they reveal about the world we live in, and the space they create for us to reflect together.
Podcast Credits for this episode
Alex Heeney edited, produced, and recorded the episode.
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An AI-generated transcript for the episode is available on Apple Podcasts.
Discover one film you didn’t know you needed:
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