Review
The film GEN_ shows how desire can paint a political map
In the film GEN_, the only Italian film at Sundance, Dr. Maurizio Bini is building a common path in which listening, caring, and sensitivity are not only a statement of resistance against rampant repressive prejudice, but also affirm the importance of public health care, in which there is a space for everyone.
There is a boy who wants to be a girl, or rather doesn't know if he wants that yet: he says he is gay, he doesn't like his physical appearance, especially his beard, and he does “womanly” things, like cleaning house. Not bad as stereotypes go, is the answer from his interlocutor: Dr. Maurizio Bini, director of the infertility and cryopreservation unit at the Niguarda Hospital in Milan.
His office is a world in which, together with his small team, the doctor is confronted every day with the life desires of very different people regarding gender identity or fertility, and who are living out the most sensitive issues of our time. There are those who seek motherhood, those who don’t feel right in their own bodies because they don’t recognize themselves in them, those who have to face everything alone because their family doesn’t accept their choice, and those who have the full support of their family – whether chosen or biological. There are some who are decided and some who aren’t; there are couples who have waited years to have access to assisted reproduction treatment, and are in danger of being cut off with the new age limits. There is disappointment and pain, deep anguish, unhealed rifts, a need for listening. A universal and complex web of feelings that concern – or at least question in some way – all of us, and that the so-called “rules” violently cast aside, in a representation of the law divorced from the singular practice of living.
This is the raw material GEN_ is working with, the new film by Gianluca Matarrese (Everything Must Go, The Last Chapter, L'Expérience Zola), the only Italian movie screened at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, in theaters across Italy from March 27 after a series of previews in Milan, Rome and Turin.
The starting point was a book Donatella Della Ratta (who shares a writing credit with Matarrese) is working on about the social and political history of hormone treatment. “That's how Donatella met Bini. He was fantastic, and asked me to film the sessions at his office,” says the director, whose film will also take part in the upcoming Cinéma du Reel festival in Paris, where he lives. As stated in the director's notes, GEN_ also refers to a socio-political moment in which the rights of minorities and women are being threatened and restricted almost everywhere in the world. This applies both to Trump's America (abortion, LGBTQ+ rights) and to Europe, starting with Italy, where the Meloni government, for instance, wants to limit assisted reproduction to heterosexual couples only, while surrogacy has been declared a “universal crime.”
“Children are not products for sale in the supermarket …” says Giorgia Meloni's voice on Bini's car radio. A physician, but so much more – we hear him speak Chinese to a patient, or tell about the mushrooms he loves to pick in the mountains, which also have gender, as he explains to another patient – he always seems to find the right stance in his daily routine that requires him to constantly move on the edges: he is attentive, empathetic, loves to defuse drama with his humor and at the same time is always direct. He is building a common path in which listening, caring, and sensitivity are not only a statement of resistance against rampant repressive prejudice, but also affirm the importance of public health care, in which there is a space for everyone, which is also being devastated more and more by policies geared towards private health care, a space for economic privilege.
The film tells the story of this world and, at the same time, expresses the same tension as the doctor’s own efforts, questioning the point of view and the very act of filming.
How can one give voice to this reality without rhetoric and without the most common stereotypes? “At first, I felt like a sponge. I had gotten there with my own prejudices too, in the sense that I have never thought about either gender transition or assisted reproduction. For me, they were topics that to a certain extent didn’t have any bearing on me personally,” Matarrese says. “Then, any certainty I had collapsed. I questioned myself as well, and in the end I came out of there full of light and hope. I don't think I've ever gotten so much from an experience as I did this time.”
And that is precisely the beauty of GEN_: in that small space, Matarrese captures fragments of bodies, the faces of those who wish to be filmed, the shoulders of those who prefer not to show themselves, also putting himself in listening mode like his protagonist, and while taking us on a journey through those stories, he arranges them in a flow of emotions that is both individual and collective.
Bini is gentle, never judgmental, follows the rules and negotiates between the needs of those who come to him and the ethical and cultural dimensions. There are the teenage twins their mom brought in because one of them wants to be a boy – he tells them to wait, explaining that transition is a complex process. And there are those like the girl who has long since decided she was a woman despite family disapproval, especially from her father, perhaps because of people’s judgment in the small mountain village with 4,000 inhabitants where she lives. “It’s tough,” she repeats, and one can see the terrible pain she is carrying. The doctor gets the process started right away.
There are scenes of tears: Bogdan is rejected twice, too many to take in a lifetime. And others cry because their long-awaited child isn’t coming. Matarrese modulates, works by subtraction and with pinpoint emotional precision; the features of his map never fall into sentimentality, but are a human and political cartography, a picture of contradictions and uncertainties, to which just one answer is simply not enough.
“Making the film was a bit like giving birth to a person. I wanted to avoid any sensationalism of any kind. There are so many stories at this doctor’s office, but I didn’t want to compile a catalog that would have been like trivializing them. Each one has its own specific weight. During editing [by Giorgia Villa], we tried to build up a body in which the individual clips had their own meaning, or were a bit like Bini builds up someone’s life. And sometimes there are three or four in one.” GEN_ captures them, opens them up slowly, lets us viewers catch a glimpse of them as well, on that edge where certainties become questions and experience is in constant transformation.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/gen-quando-il-desiderio-si-fa-mappa-politica on 2025-03-16