By Karl Quinn
Georgie Stone is no stranger to sharing the most intimate details of her life. But that doesn’t mean she finds it easy.
“It does take something from you,” the 22-year-old trans actor and activist says of constantly putting herself in the public eye for a cause she has been fighting for all her life. “You have to be very vulnerable, and sometimes it feels like I’m opening a vein.”
Maya Newell’s documentary The Dreamlife of Georgie Stone is as much an exploration of memory as of identity.Credit: Netflix
Stone’s role in the battle for trans rights has seen her feature on Four Corners, as the subject of an Australian Story profile, and land a main cast role on Neighbours, where she became the first openly trans actor to play an openly trans character on an Australian soap. But her latest project, The Dreamlife of Georgie Stone, is different. For the first time, Stone isn’t simply the subject – she is also a driving force in the production.
“This is the first time I’ve told my story and I’ve had control over it, I’ve had agency,” she says of the 30-minute short film, which has just dropped globally on Netflix. “I was part of the editing process, I was a creative producer on this film, and I had a very collaborative relationship with [director] Maya Newell, so I knew nothing could go in there that I wasn’t happy with. Basically, I had creative control for the first time.”
For most documentarians, the idea of relinquishing final cut to a subject would be the stuff of nightmares. But for Newell (Gaybe Baby, In My Blood It Runs), it represents a model “north star” for which filmmakers and others ought to be reaching.
“When you’re telling stories of people who have had their stories exploited or misrepresented, it is an honour to work collaboratively,” Newell says. “Georgie knows her own story better than anybody. I actually think it’s quite strange that lots of documentary filmmakers or authors or creatives feel they can take other people’s stories and tell them authentically.”
Newell understands the fear that allowing the subject into the process to the degree she did with Stone could backfire, but insists that wasn’t the case here. She and her collaborators – including Good Luck to You, Leo Grande director Sophie Hyde and editor Bryan Mason, who are parents of a trans child – worked with Stone to shape the storytelling approach.
In fact, she says, the overall dreamy, elliptical style that is the most striking feature of the 30-minute movie comes straight from Stone.
“She wanted this film to be of all the moments that have made her, all of those memories,” Newell says. “It’s really a study in memory as much as it is about identity.”
To give form to those memories, Dreamlife makes extensive use of a treasure trove of home movies of Georgie and her twin brother Harry that were shot by their actor father Greg Stone and mother Rebekah Robertson.
“My parents filmed a lot from when we were born until probably the age of six,” Stone says.
And what happened then; did they lose interest in you?
“Yeah, they were like, ‘OK, this kid’s boring’.”
Newell first met Stone when the latter was 14, and soon began filming her, though to what end she wasn’t entirely sure. “We toyed with the idea of making a feature, of making three films over the course of 40 years,” she says, and Stone laughs at the memory.
It wasn’t until a couple of years in that Newell stumbled across the home movie footage, which she describes as “a real gift to a filmmaker”. That footage is so central to both the texture and the narrative of the film that it’s impossible to imagine how it might have been without it.
Georgie Stone being interviewed as a nine-year-old.
There’s a young Georgie expressing with absolute clarity and certainty that she’s a girl, regardless of what gender she may have been assigned at birth, and it seems utterly uncontestable. There’s Georgie tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, a gesture repeated over the years, or smiling in a way that is both shy and candid. The cumulative effect is of a person who has always been who she is, not of one who becomes.
“Why the archive footage works so well is that you see my consistency of self over the years,” says Stone. “And you can see how parental support just allows me to be myself. It encourages the audience to reach out and to look and to empathise. All you have to do is watch it.”
With the film dubbed into 90 languages for its Netflix release, there’s every chance lots of people will watch it. If they do, Stone wants them to take away a few things: first, the importance of a supportive family, which in her case “really unlocked a future where I could thrive and be myself and just exist, just be”.
Second, she wants people to be motivated by her story to find out more, including how they can help (to that end there’s an impact campaign running in tandem with the release, at dreamlifefilm.com).
And third, she wants trans kids to see something positive to cling to in her tale, “even if it’s different from their own experience, because every trans experience is different. I hope they see a bit of themselves and just get a bit of hope from seeing a story that isn’t tragic and depressing, like so many trans stories.”
And do you also hope that maybe one day there will come a time when you don’t have to be an advocate any more, where you don’t have to keep opening up those veins?
“Yes, yes, I do. I really do,” she says. “That’s really what I’ve been hoping for forever. In an ideal world I wouldn’t have had to have advocated in the first place, I would have just been able to exist.
“I have a sinking feeling that I’m going to have to be fighting for most of my life,” she continues. “But hopefully that means there’s a generation coming after mine where they won’t have to fight as much.”
The Dreamlife of Georgie Stone is streaming now on Netflix.
Email the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, or follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin.
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