Neither

NEITHER is an ethnographic portrait of people outside the gender binary made by Babette Burgi, a culture studies student at the University of Zurich. For Romeo, who calls himself “transform”, gender is fluid, a form that can change. The camera follows Romeo with beard and high heels into the subculture of Swiss gender queers. Also Mir, who lives in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, fits neither in the female nor in the male gender box. Feeling more a man than a woman, more Mike than Mirjam, Mir puts on a beard for calming down. NEITHER explains how complex, diverse, and creative gender performances can be. The film shows different ways to live gender diversity and even the filmmaker discovers new forms to express her own gender identity.

Director: Babette Bürgi

Babette Buergi was born in 1988. During her Bachelor and Master at the University of Zurich she produced several ethnographic short films. NEITHER is a film project realized as Master thesis by Babette Buergi. She studied Popular Culture Studies, Social Anthropology and Cultural Analysis at the University of Zurich. NEITHER is her first feature film (45 minutes). The protagonists were accompanied during a period of one year in which the filmmaker became a member of the Queerscene and got access of the hidden subculture of Genderqueers. NEITHER was finished in october 2014 and has been shown in several film festivals and universities.

Specifications

Film Type:Documentary, Feature, Student
Runtime:45 minutes 20 seconds
Completion Date:October 10, 2014
Production Budget:4,000 CHF
Country of Origin:Switzerland
Country of Filming:Netherlands, Switzerland
Film Language:Dutch, German