Travelling Through Memory: Transgender Road Narratives in Contemporary Italian Documentaries

Abstract

ABSTRACT The narrative of the journey has become a dominant visual trope in the representation of transgender identities. This article examines three Italian documentaries that engage with the trans road narrative, beyond the metaphor of gender transition: C’è un soffio di vita soltanto (2021), Una nobile rivoluzione (2014), and Porpora (2021). By focusing on the use of cinematic transitions as moments of dis-connection that simultaneously elicit processes of transformation and memorialization, the article explores how Italian trans documentaries have redeployed travel narratives as occasions for pinpointing individual stories and mending collective history. In these films, the visual motif of the journey dissolves the binary between moving and staying in place, to become a fitting metaphor for a shared memory that, like any identity and like cinematic images, is enduring precisely because it is in motion.