A 7-foot-tall fundamentalist Baptist minister, Markie Wenzel made the decision at age 46 to come out as a transgender woman and start living as female.
It was a decision that ended her 20-year marriage and estranged her from her three children. It also saw her dismissed from her church and exiled to the margins of her community.
In this film, we meet Markie in 2008 as she is putting the pieces of her life back together, employed as a TSA agent and working toward her goal of sexual reassignment surgery. But over the course of the following decade, Markie begins to question her path. She misses the births of her grandchildren, struggles to present as feminine, and starts to re-evaluate her faith. On the eve of her gender reassignment surgery, she must decide for good whether to abandon her female identity and return to living as Mark, for whom life seemed so much easier. Markie’s aim is simple: to be a good person and lead a devout life, but her struggles reveal the depth of our country’s fixation on identity—political, spiritual and personal—and an acute fear of those who do not fit neatly within their own groups.
Drawing upon over a decade of vérité footage and interviews, director Matt Kliegman makes his feature debut with Markie in Milwaukee, a Diane Arbus-inspired observational style documentary: at once intimate and voyeuristic as well as tragic and hopeful.
Matt Kliegman | USA | 2019 | 88 mins.
