By Brian Landa
@BrianLandaLawyer
What do you get when you combine Madonna’s Vogue, Billy Porter’s Pose, Korean elders and ancestors, visions of a mystical bird, and the most timely issues regarding the global transgender and broader LGBTQIA+ communities? You get Byun Sung-bin’s Peafowl: a colorful, moving and essential story.
The film begins at the finals of an international regional Asian vogue pose head to head battle competition. Our heroine, pre-op trans woman Shin Myung (a name that means the bringing of both light and darkness) is a near world class talent, but as informed repeatedly, she cannot win at the highest levels until she finds her own “color.”
The goal of the competition is a $10,000 cash award which she intends to use for transgender surgery. But alas, without the aforementioned “color” – she emerges as runner up with no cash prize.
Myung had been estranged for quite some time from the family and home village when the film begins, and living in Seoul. Her father has recently passed away and she is invited back to the village to participate in the funeral rite, an elaborate and colorful drum dance around an ancestral tree.
A cousin uses the promise of an immediate cash inheritance as the carrot, which may or may not be real. Meanwhile, Myung’s uncle (brother of the deceased) is angry and displeased at her mere presence, and doesn’t believe that the father had actually requested Myung’s participation, but the cousin repeatedly insists that Myung was to be there by the wishes of the deceased before he passed.
As Myung returns to the village where most of the senior people and elders are hostile, there are a few kindly outliers. Provided with a ritual drum from childhood, she reluctantly attends the rehearsals as the other villagers (several also participating in the ritual to respect and honor the man who they call their “Master”) vacillate between outright hostility and reluctant acceptance.
Meanwhile, a couple of the village boys (one is also Myung’s cousin) are engaging in their own confused, yet biological, explorations. Items reflecting an inexperienced tumble are found in a holy family shrine by the angry uncle and of course, Myung is blamed.
Knowing the consequences from personal experience, she protects the boys at first and accepts the blame. Family secrets are then brought to the surface, and estrangements through the generations are explored and addressed.
Films like this are absolutely essential. There is a movement in America toward making these stories illegal to tell, and to suppress and even eliminate the LGBTQIA+ community altogether.
Sorry, but it’s biological, and a matter of life and death for many. Stripping physical and mental care from transgender youth will absolutely lead to suicides, a heavy overarching theme among the films at the festival this year. In no less than two films programmed for 2023, stressful workplaces and cyberbullying lead to young Korean people leaving this mortal coil by their own hand. No spoilers, but this one actually ends on a hopeful note.
I’m happy to have niche, yet more well-attended than one would expect, festivals like Asian Film Festival Dallas that bring us visual media we would not normally be exposed to.
Contrary to public belief, Dallas is actually quite liberal and diverse if you know where to look.
Being able to see a film like Peafowl on a big screen with an audience in North Texas is very much a gift.
