Markie In Milwaukee (11/27 -12/10)
When fundamentalist Baptist minister Mark Wenzel decides at age 46 to come out as a transgender woman named Markie, it ends her 20-year marriage, estranges her three children, and sees her dismissed from her beloved church and exiled to the margins of her community. Markie’s aim is simple: to be a good person and lead a devout life. Her struggles reveal the depth of our country’s fixation on identity—political, spiritual and personal—and an acute fear of those who don’t fit neatly within their own communities. When those around you won’t accept you for who you are, how do you find a way to accept yourself?
Drawing on over a decade of vérité footage and interviews, director Matt Kliegman makes his feature debut with a Diane Arbus-inspired observational style: at once intimate and voyeuristic, tragic and hopeful.
“There are no answers in this film. It’s merely showing a transgender woman trying to come to terms with her own heart at the expense of those she cares about. I can’t pretend to understand what making a decision of that magnitude feels like. MARKIE IN MILWAUKEE helps me understand, with its sympathetic take on Markie, using her own words. We see the confusion. We hear the pain. And in the end, you realize you’re not so different from this suffering human being.” —Ain’t it Cool News
“Remarkable in its frank discussion of an important matter, Markie in Milwaukee is also extraordinary for its seemingly unfettered access to its protagonist, who appears all in for this intimate dissection of their process, even if they are not always sure what that process means. Who is Markie? A human being, in all their marvelous complexity.” —Hammer to Nail
The Apohadion Theater and SPACE are pleased to co-present Markie In Milwaukee as part of an ongoing series of virtual film screenings in 2020.
