” First of all, FEM tells the story of a teenager who wants to break into music,” explains Maxime Beauchamp, creator and co-writer of this new original fiction series from Unis TV. This teenager is Zav. He discovers and affirms his identity – plural – through music while he prepares for an audition at the Conservatory from his Franco-Ontarian village of Lanark. “The main subject is not only transidentity, but if he wants to be vulnerable in his music, he will have to be vulnerable in his personal life,” adds the filmmaker, also Franco-Ontarian. For him, the objective of FEM is to continue to show that gender is a spectrum. “Zav is trying to find out where she is on that spectrum,” he says. He or she, then? When Maxime Beauchamp talks about Zav in an interview, he absolutely insists on alternating pronouns.
Although he was initially inspired by his own connection with masculinity to design his protagonist, the creator also spoke with a number of people from the Canadian LGBTQ+ community, of which he is also a part. “I’m not trans, but we all have a part of masculinity and femininity in us, and there is a lot of my acceptance in the character,” he explains. It was therefore essential for him and his team to show the public a unique Zav, whose personality was influenced by an amalgam of encounters. “We particularly spoke to trans people who have lived very different stories, to people in their thirties, to 16-18 year olds, to people in Montreal and small towns, to parents, to sexologists…”
Then, when the time came to choose Zav’s interpreter, Lennikim (his full name is Lenni-Kim Lalande), singer, songwriter and actor from Montreal, was the obvious choice. “Lennikim was known in France from the age of 12. So, he had to quickly learn what others wanted from him and what he wanted from himself,” underlines Maxime Beauchamp, who sees multiple links between the artist and Zav. “In season 1, Zav lives a life that others want for him, but Zav needs to learn when she’s going to start living her own life,” he says. And to continue: “I have to admit that, when we saw Lennikim in audition, he exuded a vulnerability, a delicacy in his acting which fit with our character. »
The key to music
Zav is, in fact, very often analytical and almost never loses his composure. “As soon as it explodes, it’s because it’s too much. Zav has a silent fragility, without being a victim,” indicates Maxime Beauchamp, who notes with regret a strong tendency towards the victimization of marginalized people on television and in the cinema. “Zav, she has power, ambition, she has a taste for breaking into music, she has friends, she has a family. The problem isn’t necessarily that people hate her or laugh at her because she doesn’t fit not in society,” maintains the creator of FEM. Rather, what is happening on screen is that her daily life is quietly killing her from the inside. “She must then use the tools she masters in other areas of her life to build herself,” he explains.
Indeed, Zav explores his transidentity through music. “We wanted to see a character with as many successes as failures,” mentions the man who began his artistic career as a choreographer and director before a foray into the audiovisual sector thanks to music videos and experimental dance films. He therefore wanted to imagine a project that would mix both traditional narrative and the music video style to address, among other things, dysphoria and euphoria. “Not all, but the majority of trans people experience body dysphoria. However, we never talk about euphoria, he points out. It was important for us to go back and forth, to see these situations that confirm gender identity. »
To do this, Maxime Beauchamp surrounded himself with “extremely talented” professionals. From Marianne Farley in the direction to Émily Bégin (whose first dramatic role) and Marie Soleil Dion in the distribution, including the artists Milk & Bone, Emmanuel Alias and Antoniya on the side of the original songs with a hyperpop accent , he was delighted to see all these beautiful people embark on the adventure FEM. “They were seduced by the first fruits,” he emphasizes.
“I hope that by showing Zav’s experience, it will open a dialogue among people,” finally says Maxime Beauchamp about his multigenerational series, to which, he believes, everyone can cling. ” In FEM, we do not answer everything, we do not show all the realities, but we show that of Zav which, even if it is fictitious, can perhaps help viewers to understand themselves better, because it is not because you don’t understand something that it’s not good,” he argues. According to the filmmaker, negative comments about trans identity are too often motivated by ignorance. “Our character has several questions and, of course, his trans identity is not the only one. There are nuances on several levels in the series,” concludes Maxime Beauchamp.