Southern Comfort

This documentary has won many awards and I can see why. This is one of the best documentaries that I have ever seen. It is about a trans-gender from a woman to man named Robert Eads. This takes place in rural Toccoa, Georgia where Robert resides in a trailer. Because of prejudice and hate, the doctors refuse to treat Robert's ovarian cancer, which develop in his existing ovaries. He finds comfort in his trans-gender girlfriend Lola Cola and attends his last Southern Comfort conference. This film taught me a lot about diversity and how it is at times disregarded in this country. This made me open my eyes and stand up for the minorities of this country. I hope that the people who view this will get the same feeling whenever they view this documentary

This film won the Grand Jury Documentary prize at Sundance this year.

Against the narrative of Robert, a transgender female-to-male responding to the irony of ovarian cancer, the director creates a deeply moving portrayal of love and determination in the face of prejudice.

Robert lives in rural Georgia, which he describes as "Bubba country" and the "home of the KKK." Nonetheless most of Robert's encounters with the heterosexual community are recounted as upbeat examples of surprising tolerance. Without any pretense, artifice, or apology, he is magnetically compelling in speech and movement. His complete lack of bitterness sets aside the distractions of his cancer, enabling the viewer share his satisfaction in life as a man and his joy in his relationships.

In spite of challenging subject matter, this documentary of Robert's self-selected "family" of transgendered men and women (and one heterosexual partner) is unerring in its ability to humanize without condescension. By not politicizing or sensationalizing her subjects' gender issues, the director has achieved a profoundly affecting emotional depth.

The film is loving and in its clarity, refreshing. I recommend it highly.

Set in the verdant yet somehow stark landscape of rural Georgia this film opens with the female-to-male transgendered subject of the film, Robert Eades, stating: `This is Bubba country.' And he is SO accurate.

This powerful film profiles transgendered people in very poor and very rural Georgia. Most of them are faced with poor or non-existent medical care by `professionals' that are, more often than not, embarrassed by their patients. These are people that are just trying to find a little happiness for themselves and receive what should be basic human rights -- and time and again they are denied those rights.

While the name of the film is "Southern Comfort," that is also the name of the annual transgender conference/convention held in Georgia. The subjects of this film survive from one day to the next for the few days each year when they know that they are not alone. As Robert states: `For once we outnumber THEM.'

Robert is in the nearly unbelievable position of being a man dying of ovarian cancer. He was unable to receive proper medical care because of the ignorance and uncaring of the doctors that were available to him. They all seemed to feel that he would be an embarrassment to their ‘medical practices.'

There are horrific examples of surgical horror stories and botched operations -- with the ghastly scars to prove it.

The interviews with the families of the subjects of the films are especially revealing:

The son of Robert Eades (from when he was a woman) can't quite keep straight whether to refer to him as a man or as his `mom.' But it is clear that he loves him deeply.

The father of Robert says: `I had a dream that my daughter would marry a man that would be President of the United States.' Never imagining for a moment that his daughter could be president. Because in his narrow and limited mind women cannot be president just as women cannot be men. He refused to have his face shown when he was interviewed.

What shines out above all else in this transcendent film about a man's life is the wisdom, wit, humour and charm of a man who the system failed. Remarkably, a man that showed no overt bitterness right up to his death in a hospice.

Lola Cola -- Roberts partner and a male-to-female transgendered person -- closes the film by saying: `Nature delights in diversity ... why can't human beings?'

I've watched this film dozens of times. It's an extremely powerful work. The timing of the filming, the choices and direction, and the rural country aesthetic are worthy of the title. I'll be watching it again soon.

At its essence, Kate Davis's film, Southern Comfort, is about a transgendered man who is dying from cancer in his female reproductive organs. Southern Comfort is more than this, however. It also deals with the intricacies of the social community that the main character, Robert Eads, has surrounded himself with since transitioning from female to male, details the romantic attachment that Robert has formed with his girlfriend Lola Cola near the end of his life, and examines the dynamics between Robert and his genetic family. More than this, Southern Comfort engages in a discourse on human sexuality that serves to enlighten the audience viewing the film on the realities of transgendered life in the backcountry of the Deep South.