11-05-2014

ScripTeast 2014: My Name Is Damjan

By ScripTeast
    ScripTeast 2014: My Name Is Damjan Suzana Tratnik, Maja Weiss (Slovenia)

    Damjan (18) is a transgender boy, who was born a girl and named Vesna, but he has always felt like a boy. To others he might be “different”, but he likes to think of himself as “just an ordinary guy”.

    When he turns 18 he officially changes his female name to a male name Damjan which revolts his father who does not want to accept him as his son. After having a serious fight with his father, Damjan is sent by his mother to a psychologist to overcome his agression. He prefers to stick with his friend Roki, a year younger straight boy who likes to party as well and dream on about a good job and a better life. Damjan meets Nela (25), an open lesbian, a gay activist and a hairdresser who studies to become a social worker. She becomes not only his true psychologist but also his hope for love and understanding of himself as a transgender boy who has been sexually abused by his father. She is also the one who tells him that he is very good at drawing. Damjan leaves home and moves in with his mates who prove to be homophobic although they knew him already as a girl in the elementary school.

    After losing his job Damjan returns at his parents' house where he has only one friend – his younger sister Sara (8) who have never seen him as Vesna. This time Damjan really wants to go his way and become somebody, not just a blue-collar worker. But one evening he desperately returns to his old friends, gets drunk, messes up with a meaningless love affair and risks losing Nela for good. When he sees his father sexually abusing his sister Sara, he protects her and accuse him of being a child molester. His mother finally realizes the same thing was happening to Damjan as a child which was the reason of his agression.

    After enrolling in the art school and his family falling appart, Damjan goes to the Ljubljana Pride Parade to find his lost love Nela. He is happy to meet her and to finally join the Parade as well.

     

    MAJA WEISS - Director and scriptwriter. Born 1965 in Novo mesto, Slovenia (than part of Yugoslavia). Graduated as Film and TV director at AGRFT (Academy for theatre, radio, film and television) in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

     She worked as an assistant director at several feature films, and as free-lance scriptwriter and director of fiction and documentary films at RTV Slovenia and different independent film production companies. She directed several feature films and feature documentaries, all of them presented and awarded at international and domestic film festivals.

     Maja also co-founded two independent production companies Bela Film and Zavod Maja Weiss, which co-produced the most of her films since 1998. She has also been the President of the Slovenian Filmmakers Association from 2005 – 2007.

    Suzana Tratnik. Born in 1963 in Slovenia. She obtained her BA in sociology from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana, and her MA in gender anthropology from the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis in Ljubljana, where she lives and works as a writer, translator, publicist and a Lesbian and Gay Film Festival organizer. She has published six collections of short stories, two novels, a children’s picture book, monodrama Ime mi je Damjan (My Name is Damjan, 2002), a radio play,two expertises: one on the lesbian movement in Slovenia, and another on lesbian literature. Recently she published memoirs about her lesbian activism and a collection of socio-political essays. She received the national “Prešeren Foundation Award” for Literature in 2007. Her books and short stories have been translated in about twenty languages, while she herself has translated several books of British and American fiction, non-fiction, and plays, including works from authors such as Judith Butler, Adrienne Rich, Leslie Feinberg, Michael Cunningham, Jackie Kay, Mary Dorcey, Katy Watson, Ian McEwan, Dennis Cooper, Helen Zahavi, Jeanette Winterson, and Truman Capote.