Photos of Her
Director: Bar Cohen
Israel, 2025, 24 min
Shooting Format:Digital
Festival Year:2026
Category:Narrative Short
Genres:Comedy, Drama, LGBTQ+
Cast:Shaylee Atary, Lioz Levi
Crew:Writer: Bar Cohen. Producer: Lev Orlov.
Email:orlov.lev95@gmail.com
Synopsis
Shiri (33), a bourgeois and conservative woman, planned her perfect maternity photo shoot, but the one who comes to photograph her is Lidor (35), a liberal trans woman. When Shiri's husband leaves the photo shoot in the middle, the meeting between the two different women raises demons and questions about their changing bodies and their identity in the world.
About the director
Bar Cohen is an Israeli director and screenwriter, the first transgender female director in Israel. Her three short films as part of her studies won extensive awards at festivals around the world (among them - the best film award at the Palm Springs Fllm Festival two years in a row, a BAFTA nomination and the best film award at the International Student Film Festival in Tel Aviv 2022). Cohen was selected for the lists of promising young people for 2022, in The Marker magazine and Timeout Tel-Aviv. In 2023 she was selected as a Breakout Creator on Vimeo Stuff Pick. Today, she develops a series for the broadcaster YES on her journey as a trans woman and writes her first full length film.
Filmmaker's note
Freud asserted that the anatomy of the body is destiny. As a transgender woman, born with a male body and identifying as female, I have pondered this sentence for years. Is masculinity my destiny? Will I ever be able to break free from the physical body I was born in?
At the center of the film stand two protagonists, completely different from each other. One, a bourgeois cisgender woman, who is married to a man according to all social norms and is not sparing with her words. The second, a transgender liberal woman, who is in a relationship with a woman and flaunts all conventions but hides behind the camera lens through which she photographs her clients. Beyond the linguistic difference between them, these two women are actually similar. Each of them experiences a life-changing transformation through her body, whether it's pregnancy or a gender-affirming process.
These processes may seem different, but over the years, I have found them to be similar. As a trans woman who cannot become pregnant, I identified with the various feelings of pregnancy—the physically changing body, the cosmic sensation of creating life while at the same time relinquishing other lives, and most importantly, the shifting and rebuilding of identity (both as a mother and as a woman).