Iphis and Ianthe is a short film that places the Greek myth of the same name in a more contemporary framework.
The original myth of Iphis and Ianthe tells the story of an impoverished couple in ancient Crete who is forced to give up their daughter due to their inability to afford her future dowry price. However, on the evening before the delivery of her daughter, Telethusa prays to the goddess Isis for a solution. Isis gives her word that she will have a daughter but the next day, Telethusa gives birth to a daughter. She hides her child’s gender to her husband and raises the baby as a boy, naming him Iphis. Iphis grows up unaware of his differences from his male friends. One day, he meets a young woman named Ianthe and they instantly fall in love. Iphis quickly asks for her hand in marriage but fears her discovery of his female sex. He begs Isis to make him a biological man and she grants his wish, fulfilling her promise to Telethusa 18 years prior.
Our film updates this story, questioning the idea that all transgender individuals seek surgery to alleviate their dysphoria. Instead, we discuss Iphis’s process of learning how to accept his body and becoming comfortable sharing himself with another human being.
Iphis and Ianthe ultimately begs the question “how do we discover safely how to share our bodies with our first love?”
We attempted to take the inherently queer story of Iphis and Ianthe and focus on the connection between Iphis and Ianthe, challenging the negative stereotypes surrounding transgender romantic and sexual love and providing a positive example of a healthy romantic relationship between a transgender and a cisgender person, creating visibility for transgender people at the University of Michigan. Through this project, we explored themes integral to the transgender experience, but rarely discussed, such as the question of how one learns how to open conversations on their biological sex during their first sexual encounter, the difference between who you see yourself to be vs. how the world sees you, aversion to sexual encounters out of fear of sharing yourself intimately with another human being, and the reality that a child always is who they are, regardless of what their parents want them to be. Through these themes, we hope to open conversations on sexuality within the transgender community in an attempt to destigmatize the sexual lives of transgender individuals at the University of Michigan and beyond.
Anticipated Results
Our project aims to contribute to awareness of the transgender community and sex positivity by highlighting issues that are not commonly talked about such as transgender sexuality, in an effort to de-stigmatize them and show the universality of these topics for people of all identities. Our project highlights the universality of themes such as falling in love for the first time, sharing your body with someone for the first time, the difference between who you see yourself to be and who the world sees you to be, and the difference between who your parents want you to be and who you actually are. We find that this shared experience of love can act as a universal language through which people of all genders can begin to develop empathy towards the transgender experience. Through this film, we seek to touch on the universality of the experience of love, and its purity regardless of who experiences it. We are also passionate about exploring the ways that the sex positivity movement can be stretched to include transgender people in their message. In this way, we will feature a healthy, sexual relationship between a transgender and cisgender character, highlighting that transgender people can, too, be sexually desirable. Finally, our creative team and cast are majority transgender, giving transgender creators an opportunity to create authentic work and tell stories central to their experiences and values.
We seek for our project to have an impact on student life and learning at U of M is centered around the development of education surrounding the transgender community. Several of our transgender team members have personally experienced discrimination on campus, highlighting the need for visibility and education on trans topics. Specifically, our film will push back against the recent trends in our media that attempt to alienate transgender people from the LGBTQ+ community. Our film will reach this goal by deconstructing the narrative that transgender people are intrinsically different in their humanity. We hope that this film will open the conversation needed to further promote trans visibility on campus and beyond.
Next Steps
Our next steps for this project include finishing filming and editing, submitting our film to various film festivals, and hosting a premiere screening of our film in Ann Arbor. We filmed the majority of our piece in the Duderstadt video studio during January of 2024 but have one scene that we plan to film outdoors over the summer once the weather gets warmer. This scene will place the material world of the video studio in contrast with the natural world of the outdoors, a central scene to our film. We plan to film this final scene this coming May. Following this shoot, we will finish editing the piece, continuing to finesse the rough cut that we currently are working on. After the completion of the film, we plan to submit to several experimental film festivals in order to bring a much needed positive transgender story to an audience outside of the University of Michigan community. Finally, in the fall of 2024 we hope to host a screening of our film in Ann Arbor, sharing our film with audiences across the University of Michigan and Ann Arbor communities.
How We Utilized Funds
We utilized the funds that we received from the Library Grant to purchase two 4T hard drives and one 500 GB hard drive for use in storing the film coverage from our project and the original music and sound effects that were created for our film by our sound designers and composers. With the remainder of the funds, we purchased artificial trees to create an indoor forest within the video studio where our story takes place.
Library Mentor Support
We received invaluable support from our library mentor Zachary Quint. Zachary provided us with dramaturgical resources that helped us continue to finesse our script including helping us trace the history of the Greek myth Iphis and Ianthe, providing us resources on the unique language in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and helping us select a lens through which to develop our reading of Iphis and Ianthe. Zachary was extremely helpful in helping us navigate through the dense world of literary research and introducing us to the myriad of research resources at the library. Zachary helped us locate a starting point for our research and specific resources to utilize, something that we would have been unable to do on our own.