Change of Sex

In the claustrophobic final days of Franco's Spain, María José (Victoria Abril), a teenage trans girl, has always known who she is—even as her brutish father and a society built on dictatorship-era moral codes refuse to see it. Sent from her provincial home to the neon-stained cabarets of Barcelona as a punishment, she instead finds a clandestine freedom there: a community of trans women, drag performers, and outcasts orbiting the magnetic Bibí (Bibiana Fernández), whose mere existence is a quiet detonation. As María José steps into her own name and her own body, she must navigate predatory men, uncertain love, and the slow, defiant emergence of a self that four decades of dictatorship had tried to erase from the realm of the possible.

Made by acclaimed auteur Vicente Aranda (The Blood Splattered Bride) when Francoist censorship was crumbling, and just months before it was formally abolished, Change of Sex (Cambio de sexo, 1977) is a landmark of trans representation in Spanish cinema—arriving the same year a Spanish court legally recognized a trans woman as female for the first time, as the country began to imagine lives it had spent forty years denying. The film features luminous, career-launching performances from future Almodóvar regulars Victoria Abril (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, High Heels) and Bibiana Fernández (Kika, Law of Desire), whose presence here marks the prologue to a queer cinematic explosion to come. Shot with a radiant naturalism by Oscar-winning cinematographer Néstor Almendros (Days of Heaven) in his only Spanish feature, and never before available on disc in North America, this restored, fully uncut high-definition presentation brings one of Aranda's most quietly radical works to Blu-ray for the very first time. Essential viewing for admirers of transgressive cinema, trans film history, and the rebellious culture of the Transition.