Mickey Reimagines Trans Storytelling Through Digital Collage

During one of the first scenes in Mickey, premiering in the Global Documentary Feature section at South by Southwest Festival, Miss Mickey paints herself in a deep yet vibrant green, using a thick paintbrush that’s more accustomed to sheetrock walls than moisturized skin. Each brushstroke is an invitation for digital augmentation, using decades-old greenscreen to map onto Miss Mickey a black-haired digital diva, complete with a tight dress and pumps. It’s a construction of Mickey that she made, an iterative avatar that shows the endless possibilities that she can be. It’s also a perfect encapsulation of the shapeshifting formulations the film takes. 

Dano García’s Mickey is a lyrical and swirling portrait documentary of their childhood friend, a transgender woman named Mickey. This moniker of “childhood friend” might be a bit of a misnomer, as Mickey began as a person of admiration and grew to be a personal friend later in life. “We met when I was 11 years old, we’re both from Sinaloa, where we went to the same Catholic school,” García says. “She would put makeup on, and this had a big impact because it’s such a conservative area. To see a trans woman out and open, especially at that age, was very impactful.”

Mickey’s openness with her gender expression left a lasting mark on García, with memories of high heels, lipstick, and blush. At one point, Mickey wore makeup to Mass, scandalizing the priests. She was fearless in the face of hegemonic power structures. The two reconnected in Mexico City years later through mutual friends and decided to live together. Friendship turned to collaboration as they made small visual projects through their phones, cameras, and computer screens. “We started making videos and editing them together over the course of ten years,” Garcia explains. We were building a queer community that would gather around the apartment where we lived and were making these videos. It became a type of statement.” For Dano and Mickey, this artmaking practice started off as a personal project and transformed into community making. These informal convenings can be seen in the film as their apartment acts as a conduit for possibility and a space for queer folks to assemble and exist. 

Miss Mickey was more than just a creative inspiration though, helping Dano navigate key aspects around life and their own identity. “I also came out as trans when we met,” Garcia says. “That’s why Mickey is such an important person in my life and why I decided to make [this film].” That welcoming presence is felt throughout the film as García captures not only Mickey as a person but how they handle the relationships around them. 

Transitioning, and the amorphousness of transness, is at the heart of the film. It was born out of lived experiences and the formal conceits of the film had to follow suit. “The way the film developed was very fluid, just like gender itself is fluid,” Garcia reveals. Mickey consists of VHS home videos, Apple Photo Booth sessions, phone footage, Sims gameplay, AOL chats, Notes app messages, re-enactments, and more, bringing a constellation of visual collage where materials are augmented, distorted, and melted together to fit cinematic tools to a trans experience, not the other way around. 

These instances of pixelated landscapes, from video games to online communications, feels wholly unique, shapeshifting its protagonist across all the various realms she occupies. These digital spaces were of particular importance to include, as García first came out in an online chatroom. They underscore both the function of digital publics for trans people to ideate on their identity outside of a body, but also the malleability of how these bodies can so easily be shaped and reformed. It’s a specific lexicon that feels instantly relatable to those who spent hundreds of hours dressing up their Sims characters or stayed up too late in chat rooms making friends across the country. 

Working across over a decade’s worth of archival footage was daunting, spanning various platforms, formats, and aspect ratios. This material also has weighted histories and memories, but from the beginning, the filmmaker and subject “always knew [they] didn’t want to portray Mickey’s experience as victim or victimizer.” This sense of nuance is given to many characters throughout Mickey’s life, including her own father. “It was very interesting that her father agreed to participate in the film, especially since he had taken part in some things that were pretty violent.” 

The two creatives brought him into the process by having him act on set, showing him edited footage, and asking how he wanted to act it out. In one particular scene, he’s on a dimly lit sound stage with a food dropper in hand. He stands over a clear glass jar and drops bits of colored solution into the blue liquid and watches it dissipate. For the process, he chose to add pink-colored droplets into the blue liquid, interpreting the material himself. “After he acted out that scene, Mickey confronted him and asked him why he had done [the things he did to her],” says Garcia. “His response was that he did it out of love, but didn’t know what he was doing was wrong. Mickey told her father that the drops in the water had estrogen instead of testosterone, and their relationship changed a lot after that.” 

The film acts as a reckoning itself, utilizing its process to revisit memories and rectify past harm. Mickey found a way to communicate with her father without surrendering her own terms or reducing her identity in order to make it digestible. It’s an inspiring maneuver, one that sprawled out, not just to her immediate family but also to those who tried to punish her transness. At one point, Mickey confronted teachers at their school who told Mickey to harm herself off campus. These powerful moments are all off-screen as the process of filmmaking avoids fetishizing the end product and instead understands the creative endeavor as generative on its own terms. The process is incredibly important, informing what exactly trans cinema is and can be. 

The potentiality here matters: the film feels like an inspiration, an example for other storytellers to find mechanisms to tell their stories. For García, it loosely translates to “the fire inside,” the English translation coming across as reductive or inadequate to fully encompass the vibrancy at stake, but equating more to a feeling. It’s fitting since the film has so many ineffable qualities, breaking the world open to reveal the impossible combinations between the digital and physical worlds, bridged together through futures constructed, envisioned, and enacted by trans people.

South by Southwest (SXSW), one of Austin’s premier festivals, returns with its 40th iteration March 12–18, with sections for music, technology, VR, TV, and film. For more information, visit sxsw.com/