22 Seconds

What you don’t say doesn’t exist, his grandfather had told him one day. And it was time to exist. Alex, until then, had only lived from the inside. Now there was no turning back. The lighted camera asked him to speak.

I’m Alex, a transsexual boy. I open this Vlog to share with you my life. Whoever knows me and sees this video will understand many things, or maybe they won’t understand or won’t want to understand anything. Being different is frightening, it makes you dizzy because it forces you to question so many things… That’s why I’m making this video, because I don’t want to be afraid or ashamed of being who I am.

Before he had time to think, he connected the camera to the computer. Twenty-two seconds. That’s how long it took for the file to be uploaded.

“22 seconds” refers, in the first person, to moments in the childhood and adolescence of a young transsexual who, from his early years, knows that his gender identity does not coincide with the sex he was assigned at birth. A work that seeks to make visible, through empathy, a group of historically silenced and denigrated people who are fighting to stop being considered sick in the eyes of the law and society.