Imagine you were at a laundromat late one night and there was only one other person in the entire building. The smell of fabric softener drenches the air, and you keep making tentative but not unwelcome eye contact with the place’s only other visitor. Would you say hello? If you couldn’t battle your anxiety to make the first move, what would you do if they started telling you about themselves? In Amélie Hardy’s welcome, warm documentary short film, Hello Stranger, we are introduced to Cooper Josephine, and we wonder if we will become fast friends.
**We have linked Hello Stranger here. Consider watching Hardy’s film before watching our interview.
Hardy’s film begins with a conversation of prepatation. The camera doesn’t reveal their faces, but we see items on the table: notes are being taken…cigarettes have been stubbed in an ashtray…the sun is shining on a clear day. Josephine, a trans woman, suggests they set their film in a public setting, because she always feels like she is being stared at for the wrong reasons. She thinks that people look at her like a clown–like a man in women’s clothing. Josephine explains that she always wants to stare back and ask if they would be staring if they knew her entire story. It’s a confident, unusual way to start a documentary, but, then again, why not?
Hardy’s film feels like a diary sprung to life. Josephine speaks directly to us and through voiceover as she explains moments of pain from her past or fantasizes about what she could say. I am not sure that I have ever seen a doc quite like it. There is something comforting about how all the cards are on the table. The laundromat is a perfect setting–almost all of us have been at the mercy of one of those places. Hardy and I talk about how when you wash your clothes, you are touching the items of fabrics that spend the most time hugging our body. You could be folding your skivvies next to a complete stranger, and it all seems ordinary because it is. We are all human and we all have to fold our clothes. Young, cis, old, white, Black, trans; the gender or expression doesn’t matter.
Hello Stranger balances snark with pathos. When Josephine expresses how her body dysphoria manifests, she refers to it as a “crust” while she dons a The Shape of Water fish monster mask. The voiceover details her feelings while she sits in a skate park and skaters whirl around her. There is something cheeky about how she can’t chage the expression on the rubbery artifice while, at the same time, I’ve never seen a transgender person reveal their dysphoria like that.
Hardy gives aspirational, generous space to Josephine’s words. The final moments of Hello Stranger are some of the most emotional, as we watching Cooper Josephine as a youngster with nothing but promise ahead of her. No child should fear feeling different. Every child should gallop to the promise of happiness from family and friends. What we should do, and what Hardy’s film ultimately espouses, is listen more than jabber. Imagine what we could learn if we have a one-on-one with someone we haven’t yet met.
