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Become a memberWhen a wannabe documentarian sees a viral video of a young trans woman claiming to be pregnant, she thinks she found the perfect subject for her next film. Documentary filmmaker “Sophie Anne Emerson” first discovers Cece online, a young transgender woman in Los Angeles who claims to have fallen miraculously pregnant. The mockumentary conceit provides a meta framing device for Cece’s journey, as Sophie (and we) follow her throughout her pregnancy: one which manages to cycle through an emotional rollercoaster of drugs, the, love, abandonment, and content creation, ultimately exploring what “successful” motherhood looks and feels like amidst the pressures and pimalls of the modern world. Director and star Tee Park, alongside co-writer and editor Alsea Diana, frequently capture Cece’s sense of disarray, but equal strength, in quiet personal moments that are achingly real and painful, while many of the film’s most hilarious sequences involve her roster of potential fathers. This includes a breast-milk fetishist played by fellow filmmaker Eugene Kotlyarenko (whose own back catalogue’s influence on young American filmmakers like Park cannot be overstated). Cece’s Interlude has all the quintessen8al qualities of this exciting new strand of indie cinema which has sprouted across the US post-pandemic, powered by youth and emotional honesty, and supported by new institutions like The Downtown Festival and LAFoM. Park’s film, like these others, stands out in the landscape of contemporary cinema not only for its keen interest in portraying the absurd realities of our present moment, but its rare commitment to doing so formally, shot with multiple types of camera that reflect the way images today are captured and commodified. Webcams and Instagram story screenshots give way to grainy nightclub footage and staged DSLR photoshoots throughout this very contemporary story of “immaculate concep8on”, all through to its heart-breaking (and warming) conclusion. – Jude Leese
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