OTV Guide | Living Unbound: You Don’t Have to Hide
Ciao OTV Multiverse! LAYA here, writing to you live from the aether for OTV’s first ever #OTVGuide!
As an #OTVFellow and one of the winners of OTV’s 2024 Pitch, Please event, I’m very excited that OTV invited me to be a guest blogger this month to discuss their newest drop, featuring four shorts tied together by the theme of Living Unbound: You Don’t Have to Hide.
Already, 2025 has been a devastating year – and it’s only February, y’all. With the calamitous fires in Southern California, this new United States administration’s pervasive anti-trans, anti-immigrant agendas, and the complete disruption of free speech and censorship of black, indigenous, queer, trans, and/or Palestinian voices on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok – the world is feeling less safe for those of us living amongst the margins.
In the face of such uncertainty, I myself have entertained doomist thoughts: doubting the future of trans filmmaking, fearing for the safety of my neighbors, wondering if there will be room for dreaming in tomorrow’s culture. But then I remember the dangerous potential of fear and I recognize that this exact feeling of hopelessness is by design. There is no better time for art and for film, especially art that resists, film that fights to illuminate who we are.
This month’s drop — featuring films Jack and Anna, Griffica, Save Face, and Expanding Sanctuary — stands to cut through that hopelessness. It stands as a timely call back to ourselves as we’re reminded of the inevitability of the truth.
Within these selections, filmmakers explore the tension between fighting to live within your truth and the consequences of defiance. In Ksenia Naughton’s Jack and Anna, a same-sex couple living together in early-1900s America are discovered and are put on a cruel trial for “crimes” of cross-dressing and homosexual marriage.
Meanwhile in Save Face, filmmaker Ian Martin imagines a dystopian future impacted by eugenics where anti-black racism forces black people to assume disguises as white citizens. Save Face follows Micah, a young teen who struggles to keep his true identity under wraps when he goes out on a date with a classmate.
“These two films are tragedies at their core. They center characters who are only being punished for trying to survive the oppressive systems they live in. And while these stories might feel hopeless, they act as a mirror to the violence we see in the systems around us, reminding us that making ourselves smaller doesn’t necessarily earn us the safety or freedom we crave. So what then?”
In Expanding Sanctuary, a Latina immigrant mother leads the charge on the fight against mass surveillance with a historic campaign to end the sharing of the Philadelphia police database with ICE. The film follows Linda Hernandez, a real life community leader, and her community’s successful journey to change legislation and protect families in the process.
Fear is meant to immobilize us. It sells us a lie that there is reverence in making ourselves smaller. Fear tries to convince us that we are safer if we do not act. While Linda’s journey is a hopeful story and a positive reminder of the power of mobilizing our communities toward change, it’s also a direct conversion of fear into action.
C.J. Arellano’s GRIFFICA
What exists on the other side of our fear at this moment? When we peel back the layers of our uncertainty, we begin to shed light on what truly matters to us spiritually, creatively, emotionally, mentally, and materially. While we may not be able to control the challenges we face in this moment, we can hold our values close to our hearts and remember that we have the power to take a stance, to use art to disrupt and to challenge.
To quote bell hooks:
“We can collectively regain our faith in the transformative power of love by cultivating courage, the strength to stand up for what we believe in, to be accountable both in word and in deed.”
Allow these films to move through you, to let fear carry you toward your grief. I hope that these works allow you to carry the uncertainties of the future with courage. And I hope that they call you to build stronger bonds with your peers, your family, your neighbors, your friends, your colleagues — because if they don’t got us, we got us.
