From Rhode Island to Seattle, Sandra embarks on a cross-country road trip to share in the world of her former son, now Annabelle, recently transitioned as a woman. As Sandra learns from Annabelle’s mentor Shannon, an older transgender woman fully at home in her identity, and shares the joy of Annabelle’s’ new relationship, we see in these 3 women’s yearnings and struggles a reflection of the way we all perceive identity, family, and belonging.

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David Gore, 36, a pathologically immature former child actor, has never been able to get over high school. Today, he was just diagnosed with skin cancer and got fired from the last acting gig he could get. Desperate for money and with nothing else to lose, he fakes his resume, and gets a job as a high school guidance counselor. The students of Grusin High love him – it might be because he drinks and smokes with them. But this is just the beginning of his downward spiral. When he meets Jabrielle, a teenaged outcast who’s just as screwed up as he is, he might learn that in the company of teenagers, sometimes you can go too far, especially when it comes to committing a ridiculous crime.

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If you’ve ever found yourself on the outside looking in, then you are probably familiar with the coping strategy of acquiring the identity of a movie character in order to gain legibility within the situation. The central character of Jenni Olson’s mesmerizing essay film is a gender dysphoric, Midwestern tomboy who is drawn to borrowing masculine personas from Hollywood characters as a mode of understanding how to deal with being drawn to unavailable women. A fascinating and unlikely reinvention story, The Royal Road simultaneously explores cinematic spiritual channeling, the conquest and colonization of Mexico and the American Southwest, fading historical Californian urban landscapes, and the passions found in butch identity to achieve an achingly beautiful and poetic defense of remembering. Probing roads from El Camino Real, to the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, to the road right outside the front door, Olson crafts a deeply intelligent and transcending observation of the human condition that reaches for redemption in the embrace of history, nostalgia, mindfulness, and sheer beauty. If you give yourself over to it, it will crack you wide open.

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