IQMF: She’s Not a Boy / Vibrancy of Silence

Tickets for International Queer & Migrant Film Festival are sold through their website.

Tatenda Ngwaru is an intersex woman struggling to make New York City her new home. After fleeing Zimbabwe with sixty dollars and the hope to finally find a place where she belongs. Driven by a desire to educate others about the lives of intersex people, Tatenda fights homesickness and personal demons to tell her story during the 2018 New York Pride.

Tatenda Ngwaru came to the United States with sixty dollars and the hope that she would finally find a place she belonged to. Raised as a boy in rural Zimbabwe, she spent her teens trying to understand her complicated gender identity in a highly restrictive society before finally discovering she was intersex, a person born with both male and female sex characteristics.

Tatenda’s decision to embrace her identity in a country where being queer is criminalized and stigmatized caused a rift in her family and eventually forced her to flee Zimbabwe after receiving community pressure and threats of violence.

Two years later, as Tatenda struggles to find her community in New York, her parents in Zimbabwe are dealing with a sense of loss in her absence. Driven by a desire to educate others about the lives of intersex people, Tatenda fights homesickness and personal demons to tell her story during the 2018 New York Pride.

This film will be screened with Vibrancy of Silence: A Discussion with My Sisters.

In this documentary, Marthe Djilo Kamga takes us along as she engages in fruitful conversations with four other African female artists who, like her, not only have experienced exile but also know how necessary it is to transmit to younger generations what they have learned as their multiple identities have evolved and fused. The original score that accompanies the voices of these three generations of women is an active part of the adventure, a witness for the future.

A Discussion with My Sisters is the first installment of Frieda Ekotto’s visual research project Vibrancy of Silence: Archiving the Images and Cultural Production of Sub-Saharan African Women on African women as the unsung heroines of artistic and cultural production.