MyMy
2013 · 14m · Australia
Directed by Anna Helme
Genres: experimental, LGBTQ+, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, provocative, surreal
A young trans person uses a cyber-feminist CD-ROM to create a cyborg twin.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A trans person literally duplicating herself through a feminist software artifact—this is the kind of genre-scrambling premise that makes you sit up and ask *why* no one's done it before. The fact that it's contemplative rather than explosive, surreal rather than explanatory, means Helme's actually trusting the viewer to sit with the weird.
Helme positions herself within a lineage of experimental video art and cyber-theory cinema, where the CD-ROM becomes both plot device and formal statement about the archive and the self. The 14-minute duration and measured pacing suggest a work aware of its own sculptural relationship to time.
The decision to make the cyborg twin *another version of the same person* rather than an alien other—that's the choice that breaks the film open; it shifts from sci-fi spectacle into something introspective about identity and doubling that a bigger budget would've explained away.
Reviews
MyMy's theme, narrative, and style is pioneering in queer cinema, searching for new languages and significations to articulate genderqueer.