Sea­horse

The tri­als and tribu­la­tions of child­birth are well-doc­u­ment­ed in cin­e­ma, but in Jeanie Finlay’s ten­der doc­u­men­tary a unique sto­ry of new life comes into rich focus. Fred­dy McConnell, a 30-year-old trans man, is des­per­ate to start a fam­i­ly of his own, and Fin­lay is his com­pan­ion on this long and ardu­ous journey.

Togeth­er they chron­i­cle his extra­or­di­nary strug­gle to ful­fil a basic human desire that so many often take for grant­ed: to cre­ate and nur­ture human life. Tak­ing its name from that male sea­hors­es car­ry their off­spring, the film chal­lenges per­cep­tions of preg­nan­cy and par­ent­hood, as well as pro­vid­ing a touch­ing por­trait of mod­ern identity.

We join Fred­die as he is work­ing through the bio­log­i­cal logis­tics of bring­ing a child into the world. One gains a sense for the strange, clin­i­cal rig­ma­role of it the process – buy­ing sperm from the inter­net, attend­ing appoint­ments with var­i­ous med­ical pro­fes­sion­als. So many films extol the sweep­ing romance of child­birth, but for Fred­die, it’s often a lone­ly, drain­ing affair. Aside from the phys­i­cal­ly and men­tal­ly exhaust­ing aspects of actu­al preg­nan­cy, he is forced to con­tend with society’s open hos­til­i­ty toward the trans community.

As such, he retreats into small, safer cir­cles – but even the peo­ple clos­est to Fred­die who ulti­mate­ly mean well some­times dis­play a frus­trat­ing igno­rance regard­ing his preg­nan­cy. Fred­die main­tains an admirable sto­icism, though Fin­lay is adept at say­ing so much with a lin­ger­ing cam­era – we notice the tired­ness creep­ing in, and gain a sense for how tru­ly soul-destroy­ing it must be, being forced to jus­ti­fy your exis­tence at every turn.

In allow­ing Fred­die to tell his own sto­ry through self-taped sequences and min­i­mal direc­to­r­i­al inter­fer­ence, Fin­lay pro­vides a voice to a com­mu­ni­ty often ren­dered voice­less or shout­ed down by loud­er voic­es. At a basic lev­el, it’s a sim­ple sto­ry, about a human being try­ing to bring anoth­er human being into the world, and Fin­lay avoids flashy touch­es or flour­ish­es, favour­ing a nat­u­ral­is­tic approach that allows the sub­ject – fas­ci­nat­ing and heart­break­ing as it is – to real­ly res­onate with the audience.

Fred­die is forced to con­front his own naivety and the unfore­see­able chal­lenges that his preg­nan­cy brings, includ­ing the phys­i­o­log­i­cal changes he must under­go, dev­as­tat­ing after he has spent so long try­ing to feel com­fort­able in his body.

Yet for all the hard­ship Fred­die has to endure, Sea­horse is also full of hope, resilience, and a whole lot of love. His moth­er is a bea­con of sup­port (all the more impor­tant giv­en the dif­fi­cult rela­tion­ship Fred­die has with his father). And, when Fred­die meets his new baby for the first time, all the pain fades into back­ground noise.

The old adage sug­gests it takes a vil­lage to raise a child, and Finlay’s film feels like a qui­et but pow­er­ful step towards a more under­stand­ing soci­ety, in which indi­vid­u­als are not only grant­ed auton­o­my over their own bod­ies and repro­duc­tive rights but find accep­tance too.