There’s something quietly shattering about GEN_, something that lodges under your skin and hums there for days. Directed by Gianluca Matarrese, this deeply intimate documentary slips past rhetoric and politics and enters the lives of real people—people who want to live, love, become. People who want to inhabit the truth of who they are in a world that so often punishes them for even asking.
Set in a Milanese hospital, GEN_ centers on the work of Dr. Maurizio Bini, a warm and unflinchingly ethical physician who offers gender-affirming and reproductive care in one of the few public facilities in Italy still doing so. His office is a sanctuary, a place where trans and queer people, as well as those facing complex fertility challenges, come not only for medical intervention, but for recognition. For possibility. For hope.
The film opens with a chilling reminder of what they’re up against: voices of right-wing Italian politicians spewing fear and vitriol about gender and the “unnatural” decay of family. We don’t see their faces, just hear them on the radio as a car speeds through the dark. It’s a perfect metaphor—how ideology travels, infects, spreads into public institutions and private lives. And how it looms even in the most personal of choices.
But this isn’t a film about politicians. It’s about people. About the softness and fragility of seeking care in a system that barely tolerates your existence. About the radical courage it takes to say, I want to be myself, in a country—no, a world—that tells you, that’s too much.
Matarrese’s camera is quiet, observant. There’s no narration, no score pushing you toward a feeling. Just long, patient scenes: a woman wondering whether the state will still recognize her if she changes her name. A trans man seeking top surgery and IVF in the same breath. A young person asking for hormone therapy, their voice trembling slightly as they speak. Dr. Bini listens, answers, affirms—not with grand gestures, but with the steady resolve of someone who has chosen, every day, to fight for those most at risk.
I kept thinking, watching this, how rare it is to see trans and queer people on screen without spectacle. There’s no sensationalism here, no crisis arc to resolve. Just bodies, stories, lives. The mundane sacredness of care. And in that way, GEN_ is quietly revolutionary.
It would be easy to think of this as a film about them—about Italy, about a uniquely European battle for identity and autonomy. But if you live in the United States, you know better. You feel the chill creeping across our own systems. Trans healthcare is vanishing from entire states. Clinics are being shuttered. Doctors threatened. Parents investigated. We are not watching this from a safe distance—we are in it.
There’s a scene in GEN_ where a couple discusses selecting embryos based on certain traits—not out of vanity, but fear. They know what the world does to bodies it doesn’t understand. The implication is devastating: people aren’t just fighting to live, they’re planning for the world’s cruelty before life has even begun.
And yet, despite this darkness, the film never succumbs to despair. It holds space for beauty, for humor, for tenderness. In one moment, a patient laughs softly at a medical misunderstanding. In another, a young person looks directly into the camera and simply breathes. These moments—brief, ordinary—feel enormous. Because to be visible, to be treated with dignity, is still a miracle for too many.
Dr. Bini himself is a marvel of contradiction: quiet, but firm. Kind, but unafraid to challenge the system. He doesn’t posture as a hero. He’s just doing his job. But in a world where that job requires navigating political landmines, balancing scientific ethics with human urgency, and absorbing a constant barrage of fear-driven resistance, that job becomes a kind of heroism. Not loud, not cinematic—just consistent, and deeply human.
What’s remarkable is that GEN_ resists easy conclusions. It doesn’t wrap up the struggle with a triumphant monologue or a hopeful montage. It stays with the questions. What does it mean to affirm a gender in a culture built to deny it? How do you parent a future child when the world already has rules about who they should be? What do we owe each other, as people, when the state refuses to see us?
And perhaps most piercingly: What happens when even the hospital becomes a battleground?
As someone still navigating who I am—whether I’m nonbinary, trans, or somewhere in the middle—watching GEN_ left me raw. It wasn’t just emotional; it was deeply personal. I felt a wave of grief, not only for the attacks on gender-affirming care, but for the broader war being waged on bodily autonomy in this country. In the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, reproductive care has become a battleground, too. We’ve seen pregnant people turned away from hospitals while miscarrying. We've read about women and teens who’ve died—not because treatment didn’t exist, but because it was denied. Because politics stepped between them and the care they needed.
And as I try to piece together my own identity, I’m doing it in a country that’s telling people like me, like us, that our existence is up for debate. That our choices, our health, our futures are conditional. That’s a terrifying thing to carry. But still—watching GEN_, I also felt something else: a quiet kind of awe. At the resilience of those who keep going. At the rare spaces where care still exists, not as a reward, but as a right. Spaces that remind us that we’re not alone, even when it feels like the world wants us to be.
This documentary doesn’t scream its message. It doesn’t need to. It’s quiet because it trusts you to listen. And if you do, really listen, you’ll understand the urgency: our bodies are political whether we want them to be or not. Our identities are not up for debate. And our right to care—for ourselves, for our future children, for our communities—is not something to be begged for. It is ours.
GEN_ is not just a film—it’s a call. A mirror. A gentle, devastating insistence that every person deserves the freedom to become.
Watch it. And don’t look away.
Director: Gianluca Matarrese
Featuring: Dr. Maurizio Bini
GEN_ screens at the Melbourne International Film Festival on 13 and 23 August 2025. Visit MIFF.com.au for tickets.