ABSTRACT
The film documentary Becoming Julia , directed by Ruth Cullen, was first shown at the Sydney Film Festival in June 2003 before going to Melbourne 2 months later. The television channel SBS broadcast the film in April 2004, thereby bringing Cullen’s work to a wider audience in Australia. Becoming Julia is the outcome of collaboration between a film director and a preoperative transsexual living in Sydney, Australia’s largest city. It invites viewers to consider several important questions: What are men and women like in twenty-first-century Australia? How does the film reflect and distinguish itself from other transsexual narratives? What do we learn about the experience of gender transition by following Julia? And what are the problems that beset a transgendered person in contemporary Australia?
