Orchids: My Intersex Adventure

6.7
2010 1 hr 0 min Documentary

Along the roads of Australia travels a small film crew headed by filmmaker Phoebe Hart, who is determined to turn this on-the-road trip into a journey of self-discovery. Her hermaphroditism played a painful and significant role in her past: she has had to deal with it from her adolescence on, but now this conflict has happily been solved. Even her relationship with her parents was damaged by her condition: in her opinion they were to blame for having forced her to undergo a traumatic operation to remove her internal testicles. Along the road, she will connect with other intersex people, ready to open up to her about their common condition. Will Phoebe succeed in openly confronting her mother, who is reluctant to be interviewed, and to talk about an issue that is so important for her? Will she find the answers she is looking for? A journey of self-discovery that is difficult, but at the same time light, ironic and detached.

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Reviews

WasAnnon
2011/06/25

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

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Konterr
2011/06/26

Brilliant and touching

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Chirphymium
2011/06/27

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

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Mathilde the Guild
2011/06/28

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

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carolinacoles
2011/06/29

Very well done. A potentially titillating subject treated with honesty and grace. Informative and thought-provoking, as a good documentary should be. I am impressed with the production value, which is very high. Impressive for a relative novice film maker. I look forward to future films from her. The participants in the project are incredibly generous in sharing their stories. They are sympathetic without being pathetic. the film maker and participants could have dwelled on the callous and ignorant treatment they received from the medical establishment. It would have been understandable if the film became a way to exorcise such experiences. But they managed to convey some sense of this without it becoming the focus of the piece or coming off as a rant.

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dfle3
2011/06/30

I took a punt watching this docu on the ABC, over a week ago, on a Sunday. Thought it might have been prurient but it wasn't and the sympathetic subject (Phoebe Hart) makes for an engaging host. It's my guess that this docu is her PhD project. The docu has a narrative arc, of sorts...Phoebe's journey to connect with others that share her condition and her desire for her parents to participate in her documentary...which proves a challenge for her. She has less trouble getting others with her condition to appear on camera.Anyway, her condition is that she is, in fact, male. There's a medical name for her condition...hmm...don't see a note on that...something to do with the body being allergic to male hormones or something, which makes the person look female (to a lesser or greater extent) even though they are actually male...oh, found it "A.I.S"...Googled that acronym...it means "Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome".I must say, that Phoebe makes for a great looking woman! Phoebe has a boyfriend (then husband) in the documentary. This fact brings up some interesting philosophical questions...James Davidson, her husband, actually had to grapple with some of them...as in does loving Phoebe make him gay? Not raised but which came to mind is the fact that Phoebe was able to get married...how is that possible? It is perhaps an odd state of affairs where homosexuals cannot marry each other but intersex people can marry, it seems. Is that fair? Logical? On first thinking about this issue I thought that maybe the issue had to do with "choice" as in perhaps gays are seen as "choosing" their lifestyle and that "choice" isn't sanctioned by society. However, a simpler explanation has come to mind, on reflection...paperwork. Chloe would, no doubt, have "female" listed as her gender on her birth certificate...thus, marriage in her case was possible and wasn't made into an issue of biology, but rather bureaucracy. It would be interesting to know if someone with Chloe's condition, if identified at birth, would have had a change to their listed gender on their birth certificate. Is there a third option for gender? "Other"?Other issues which go to the ethics of this situation...* Phoebe and her sister Bonnie (who shares Phoebe's condition) had surgical intervention in their early teens to make them look more female. You have to wonder about that...the medical profession perhaps unnecessarily promoting surgery? Did the girls have a choice? Why not give them time to make an informed choice...when they're older, perhaps? * Perhaps it would be ethical to abort unborn babies with this condition? One of the Hart sisters does say that they would be happy to keep a child of theirs with this condition (that may be Sophie, I think, who is biologically female but a carrier of the gene which creates this condition...like their mother).* One feels that their should be some sort of etiquette about informing sexual partners about one's condition before sexual intercourse...I think it was Phoebe who mentioned not always doing that. You can certainly feel for them about being reluctant to do so, yet there is the flipside of the poor form in not doing so. For some reason Phoebe seems an excellent role model...she seems very well adjusted (or just finely tuned? Sorry...I have no idea what that distinction means...it's a line from a Do Re Mi song!). You could imagine someone being a berk if they hadn't of been told by Phoebe of their condition...pity all people can't be so well adjusted as Phoebe...apart from a lack of honesty at times.Both Phoebe and Bonnie, I think, mention being treated like freaks by the medical profession...like slabs of meat. I can relate to that...but gosh, not in the same class like those two...I just had to get some medical exam (nothing major, I don't think) and I felt that the person performing the task was treating me like a piece of meat too, which I resented...maybe it wasn't personal Phoebe and Bonnie? Perhaps it's just the kind of character trait which is overrepresented in medicine? Even though this is a documentary, the scene with Phoebe and Bonnie in a tent did seem contrived. Bonnie's a performance artist of some sort and actually has some very weirdly titled songs in the end credits! If I can be allowed to interpret here, a photo of Phoebe's father (perhaps with his family at a young age) seemed to convey that he had the weight of the world on him...just looking at his eyes.To close, you can view teenage years as being a universal experience of everyone feeling like a freak. Some people actually have real, profound issues to deal with, like Phoebe and Bonnie. Phoebe does come across as a great role model for people with A.I.S. She has come out of her traumatic teenage years stronger and committed to living life to the full. Once again, it's just the way that she seems so extraordinarily well adjusted which makes a positive impression on you...and it doesn't hurt that she is so good looking. This film is yet another testament to the power of story telling to make you feel sympathy/empathy for a human being who is different to you...and it's a power which is also used by some to create or feed hate for others who are different to you.I did notice that Phoebe wrote the plot summary for this IMDb entry. It would be nice to think that coming out in this way has been a positive experience for her and that it's not only people with A.I.S. who find her worth knowing...there should be courses in being nice and well adjusted.

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