CRISTIÁN
Director's Bio
Cristián Martin is a storyteller whose work centers resilience, identity, and community. Through intimate, character-driven work, he creates space for marginalized voices to be represented with authenticity and care.
His previous work includes directing the documentary short Boricua No Te Quites and contributing post-production support to the New York Emmy-winning series Puerto Rican Voices.
He is currently directing Cristián, a documentary rooted in his own experience navigating medical care, legal recognition, and identity in modern-day America. Cristián approaches filmmaking as both a creative and community-rooted practice, committed to emotional truth, access, and representation.
Producer's Bio
John Warren Borja Martín Austin (aka buhito) is an independent documentary filmmaker, photographer, and painter of Filipino, CHamoru, and Western European descent. He has photographed, filmed, listened, observed, recorded, or archived in 30+ countries, reservations, and tribal territories. His works focus on themes of identity, indigeneity, and the environment.
Find out more about John on his website.
This preview contains select archival footage included for evaluation purposes. All rights remain with their respective owners. Licensing is currently being pursued.
Logline
Cristián is a first-person documentary following my year-long journey as a trans person navigating the complexities of social, legal, and medical transition. Through this personal lens, the film explores identity and the ongoing process of becoming, centering both the challenges of transition and moments of trans joy.
Project Synopsis
This documentary follows my journey through the first year of my transition as I document medical, legal, and social challenges along the way, offering a very personal and sometimes humorous take on the daily realities of my life. As a first-generation individual navigating both cultural expectations and religious frameworks that stigmatize LGBTQ identities, I moved through an intersection of influences that made it difficult to fully recognize who i was. I often felt invisible, as though I was performing a scripted version of myself shaped by expectations that didn’t reflect who I was. It took nearly 30 years to come into alignment with who I am. It was neither immediate nor linear, but it unfolded over time through moments of clarity, uncertainty, and change.
At the center of the film is an ongoing negotiation with systems that shape whether transition is possible in real time: navigating an insurance process that repeatedly threatens access to hormone therapy, managing uncertainty around medical approval, and pushing through bureaucratic barriers that make even basic care feel unstable. These challenges are not background, they actively shape the pace, urgency, and emotional stakes of my journey as it unfolds.
The film is guided by my voice and perspective, positioning me as both subject and storyteller. Through a combination of self-reflection, present-day footage, and archival VHS material, the film traces the legal, medical, and social aspects of my becoming. It captures the process of beginning hormone replacement therapy and moving through the systems that shape access to care. Cristián also reflects how my relationship with faith continues to evolve, including how I approached choosing my name.
At its center, the film explores what it means to live truthfully within systems that impose rigid expectations around identity. In addition to my own perspective, the film situates this journey within a broader cultural and political landscape in which access to care, visibility, and autonomy for trans people are increasingly contested. As legislation and public discourse continue to shape what is possible in real time, these external pressures are not distant context, they directly inform the decisions, risks, and emotional stakes captured on screen. By grounding a deeply personal experience within this moment, the film reflects not only an individual process of becoming, but a reality many are navigating right now.
By holding both the weight of these challenges and the moments of joy, Cristián offers a human portrait of the trans experience, one that leaves space for hope in a time when it is urgently needed.
Project Description
Cristián is an intimate, first-person documentary told through a diary-to-camera approach, drawing the audience directly into my world as I navigate the first year of my medical, legal, and social transition. Filmed from the inside out, I serve as both subject and storyteller, offering a perspective that refuses distance and instead insists on proximity, presence, and truth.
Through raw, immediate recordings and deeply personal archival footage captured before my transition, the film creates a layered portrait of becoming. These images are vulnerable, poetic, and at times disorienting, collapsing past and present as I confront who I was, who I am, and who I am fighting to become. The result is not just a record of transition, but an embodied experience of it.
At its core, Cristián explores identity, vulnerability, and self-understanding, while deliberately centering trans joy as a necessary and radical force. The film does not turn away from the complexities of transition, but it resists reducing the experience to struggle alone. Instead, it holds contradiction: fear alongside clarity, grief alongside emergence, isolation alongside connection.
Set against an escalating political landscape in which trans lives are both hyper-visible and increasingly targeted, the film carries an urgent weight. As legislation and public discourse attempt to define and restrict trans existence, Cristián asserts the right to self-definition through lived experience. The camera becomes a tool of agency, documenting a life in motion within systems that were not built to hold it.
The stakes are immediate and deeply personal. This is a process that cannot be undone, a transformation unfolding in real time. At the same time, the film speaks to a broader absence: the scarcity of trans stories told from within, with authorship, complexity, and care. By placing the audience inside this journey, Cristián challenges passive observation and instead demands emotional and ethical engagement.
Beyond the screen, the film is designed to live in conversation with community. In collaboration with trans and queer-led organizations, it will be activated as both a storytelling work and a resource, reaching audiences who are searching for reflection, language, or recognition.
At its heart, Cristián asks: What does it mean to witness yourself becoming? What does it cost to live in alignment with who you are? And what becomes possible when that transformation is seen, held, and shared?
This project is fiscally sponsored by SIMA Studios, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. All donations are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. To support the production, please visit our PayPal donation page.
