When Louise Weard began shooting her debut film in 2023, she envisaged it as a snappy, 90-minute portrait of a group of queer and transgender friends in Vancouver. Now, Castration Movie, a crowdfunded camcorder epic made for less than C$60,000 (£33,000), runs four-and-a-half hours. And that’s just part one. When the entire magnum opus is finished later this year, Weard estimates it will clock in at more than 12 hours. Take that, Béla Tarr. Watch your back, Rivette.
Not that anyone could mistake Castration Movie for slow cinema. “It’s not as if I’m asking you to watch farmers in a field for 20 minutes,” says the 31-year-old director over coffee in an east London cafe. Indeed not: the first hour-and-a-half follows a budding “incel” as he sinks deeper into the manosphere. The narrative focus then switches abruptly to a trans sex worker, Michaela “Traps” Sinclair, played by Weard. Michaela’s abrasive exterior conceals a yearning for motherhood and intimacy; she may have the tongue of Joan Rivers and the decorum of Divine, but she’s as fragile as Edith Piaf. “People are always relieved when they find out I’m nothing like Michaela,” says Weard, whose background is in Canadian underground horror. “She’s the nightmare version of me.”
