Cristián
A first-person documentary following Cristián’s year-long journey as a trans person navigating the complexities of social, legal, and medical transition. Through this personal lens, the film explores identity and the ongoing process of becoming, centering both the challenges of transition and moments of trans joy.
At a glance
Project scope: 40-60 minute documentary film
Target premiere date: 2027
This project is currently in post-production.
A note from Cristián on his film, Cristián
Cristián is an intimate, first-person documentary told through a diary-to-camera approach, drawing the audience directly into my world as I navigate the first year of my medical, legal, and social transition. Filmed from the inside out, I serve as both subject and storyteller, offering a perspective that refuses distance and instead insists on proximity, presence, and truth.
Through raw, immediate recordings and deeply personal archival footage captured before my transition, the film creates a layered portrait of becoming. These images are vulnerable, poetic, and at times disorienting, collapsing past and present as I confront who I was, who I am, and who I am fighting to become. The result is not just a record of transition, but an embodied experience of it.
At its core, Cristián explores identity, vulnerability, and self-understanding, while deliberately centering trans joy as a necessary and radical force. The film does not turn away from the complexities of transition, but it resists reducing the experience to struggle alone. Instead, it holds contradiction: fear alongside clarity, grief alongside emergence, isolation alongside connection.
Set against an escalating political landscape in which trans lives are both hyper-visible and increasingly targeted, the film carries an urgent weight. As legislation and public discourse attempt to define and restrict trans existence, Cristián asserts the right to self-definition through lived experience. The camera becomes a tool of agency, documenting a life in motion within systems that were not built to hold it.
The stakes are immediate and deeply personal. This is a process that cannot be undone, a transformation unfolding in real time. At the same time, the film speaks to a broader absence: the scarcity of trans stories told from within, with authorship, complexity, and care. By placing the audience inside this journey, Cristián challenges passive observation and instead demands emotional and ethical engagement.
Beyond the screen, the film is designed to live in conversation with community. In collaboration with trans and queer-led organizations, it will be activated as both a storytelling work and a resource, reaching audiences who are searching for reflection, language, or recognition.
At its heart, Cristián asks: What does it mean to witness yourself becoming? What does it cost to live in alignment with who you are? And what becomes possible when that transformation is seen, held, and shared?
Creators of Cristián
Cristián Martin
buhito
Producer
I’m a documentarian currently creating out of Kansas City, Missouri.