Shemale Trace Lysette: 'A lot of fights but now I'm an actress'

She has recently completed the sexual transition, her passport still has a male name and her traumas and experiences behind the image of a beautiful woman carry them within herself but above all she puts them on stage.

At the Lido today there is Trace Lysette, the protagonist of MONICA, the film by Italian director Andrea Pallaoro, the second of the five competing for the Golden Lion to go into competition, the day after the triumphal landing of the cannibal in love Timothée Chalamet who with Taylor Russell played Luca Guadagnino's Bones and all.

    Long blond hair, makeup to enhance the features, an elegant charm that does not go unnoticed, Lysette, immediately given among the favorites for the Volpi Cup in Venice 79, is in her first leading role.

"Monica is a fundamental moment, she represents a great opportunity for me, to tell who I am but also to be considered a full-fledged actress. In the past I had difficult moments, I wanted to give up everything, the gender label haunted me, I slept on a mattress on the floor at the house of acquaintances, then a friend encouraged me to invest in myself, to move on, I took acting lessons, the call came for the Law and Order series and my life began to rise again, right after the role in Transparent and now I can dream big.

Thing?

Being called in a movie as an actress and not a transgender, I think I deserve it, I worked hard, I have talent, "says the 34-year-old, a Neapolitan-born grandmother, born in Kentucky, raised in Ohio, right where it was filmed. Is Hollywood ready? Is it as welcoming and inclusive as it professes to be? "No need to categorize, we're just actresses."

    Andrea Pallaoro, the director of Trento for 23 years in America, in Los Angeles, has chosen Lysette "among 30 candidates, trans actresses, but with her there was a special empathy, I was struck by her ability to be on the scene more than acting, perhaps for experiences similar to those of the story to which he contributed with his experience ".

The Monica of the film's title (in the hall with I Wonder) is a woman who returns home, called by her brother to greet her dying mother: they have not seen each other for years, since she moved to California, not accepted by her family for his sexual identity.

"It's a cinema based on questions and not on answers", explains Pallaoro, in the second chapter, after Hannah with Charlotte Rampling, of a trilogy, "but here I tell a modern heroine,

a character full of courage and generosity who manages to forgive being abandoned.

It's true, she is a trans, but this if at the beginning it was a spring in the story, based on events that I knew as that of a person dear to me or Tracy herself, then during the film it almost faded into the background and the story becomes that of a daughter who finds her mother and family after a long absence, who wants to make up for lost time, the memory that the sick mother has lost becomes the center of everything and acceptance of the other is the basis of human relationships ". The mother is Patricia Clarkson, a fantastic actress who in Venice does nothing but support Lysette.

    Filming did not go quite smoothly: "Three locations prevented us from shooting knowing the theme we were dealing with, unfortunately it happens in the deep America that Trump voted", says the director who loves Michelangelo Antonioni's cinema, has Fassbinder, Lucretia Martel , Tsai Ming-liang between myths and the Venice Exhibition as a 'cradle'.