After 17 years, Nicole Costa gets in touch with Iván Ojeda, her old Chilean friend from college. Back then he was a talented theater director and playwright, but it turns out he has reinvented himself. Iván now goes by Monalisa and works as a prostitute on the streets of New York. Intrigued by this transformation, Costa decides to follow Iván Monalisa, a “gender-neutral two-spirit,” in their tough and vulnerable life filled with fleeting sexual encounters and addiction to hard drugs. Nonetheless, Monalisa does continue to write beautiful, raw pieces about life and survival in New York. Recent scenes of Monalisa’s attempts to get a visa and her first successes as a writer are interspersed with old VHS footage, snippets of telephone conversations and extracts from her work. All this is framed by scenes of Monalisa proudly parading through the streets of New York—a living artwork searching in the shadows for the light of self-expression.

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The legacy of Billy Tipton, a 20th-century American jazz musician and trans icon, is brought to life by a diverse group of contemporary trans artists. Tipton gained fame as a musician throughout the United States in the 1940s and ’50s, but his trans identity was not known throughout the echelons of the jazz and pop worlds, and it wasn’t revealed publicly until after his death in 1989. Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt’s brilliantly crafted doc maps out Tipton’s undeniable legacy, while examining the disgraceful media scrutiny and questions of legitimacy his family endured after his death.

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Harry has been partying for 48 hours when he meets Johannes on the dance floor of a club in Berlin. With 15 hours until his flight home, Johannes offers to help him print his boarding pass. This mundane task leads to a day together wandering the city. The contrasts in their lives and values force each one to confront their own truths. Boys Meet Boys is a feature length mumblecore about the journey of a brief encounter: the mark left by a fleeting moment of joy.

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