Southern Comfort

By Angela Wibking

It's dawn on Easter Sunday and 52-year-old Robert Eads is dying of cancer. A gaunt figure in jeans and a black cowboy hat, he sits near his trailer home in Toccoa, Ga. and reflects on the doctors who refused him treatment and the mother and father who shun him. "I don't hate them. I feel sorry for them," he says. "But I can't say I actually forgive them for what they've done."

So begins Southern Comfort, the documentary that took the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival this year. On the surface, Robert's story doesn't sound like the stuff of which prize-winning documentaries are made. After all, people die every day of cancer; the medical profession balks at treating some of them and countless adult children are estranged from their parents. Then, as Robert pauses to puff on his ever-present pipe, he reveals that he is a female-to-male transsexual with ovarian cancer. And there it is, the "truth is stranger than fiction" element that compelled New York filmmaker Kate Davis to spend a year of her life filming Robert Eads at the end of his.

"I met Robert while I was doing a film for A&E on the transgender community's fight for civil rights," Davis recalls. "I thought the whole prejudice of the medical profession Robert experienced was shocking and that it was important to tell the world that this still happens. But the main reason I did the film was Robert himself. He was so warm and funny -- not theatrical or extreme at all. He broke the transgender stereotype that you see paraded across the stages of daytime talk shows."

Because Robert was in the last stages of terminal cancer when Davis met him, time was of the essence in terms of filming his story. "There really wasn't time to fundraise and besides I knew it would be a tough story to sell," says Davis. So Davis, who had directed and produced documentaries for a decade but hadn't shot a camera in years, bought a DV camera and headed south to Georgia. At times, co-producer Elizabeth Adams accompanied her and served as sound technician, but often it was just Davis, Robert and what he calls in the film his "chosen family."

Davis takes a "let the story tell itself" approach that allows us to gradually get to know Robert and those closest to him. There is Maxwell, another female-to-male transsexual, with whom Robert has a warm but sometimes prickly paternal relationship. More outspoken and abrasive than Robert, Maxwell is in a relationship with Cory, a male-to-female transsexual. And there is Cass, who Robert describes as the most "closeted" of his circle. Married to Stephanie, a biological female who has survived seven abusive marriages, Cass is the most reserved of the trio.

We also meet one of Robert's two sons, both of whom are supportive of their mother's life as a man. In what is perhaps the most moving moment of the film, Robert recalls the joy and pain of being pregnant - loving the life being created within yet despising the female anatomy that made such creation possible. "I always knew I wanted to be a parent," he says in the film. "But I felt homosexual when I was married to my husband because I knew I was a heterosexual male. So being pregnant was the worst and the best at the same time."

After "hiding for 20 years in the gay community in order to be with a woman," Robert recalls how he finally began testosterone treatments and underwent surgery - "top but not bottom" - at age 35. As the film unfolds we learn that Robert has also found love at last with Lola, a male in the midst of his own journey to becoming a woman. "When I started filming, I had no idea that their romance would become the main story," says Davis. It is the love story that drives the film and makes it more that an indictment of bigotry. "I thought this would be a niche film but audience reaction has been so surprising. People seem to respond to the human drama of it."

The drama of real life is also illustrated in Robert's determination to attend one last "Southern Comfort," an annual transgender conference in Atlanta. Growing ever weaker and encountering challenges to his authority from Maxwell, Robert painstakingly plans his speech before the conference. Just as carefully, he also plans to squire Lola to the conference gala so she can attend "the prom she never had." Emaciated but still cutting a fine figure in his tuxedo, he achieves both goals before being admitted to a hospice. There, in one of the last shots of the film, we leave Robert to die in Lola's arms.

"The hardest part of making the film wasn't so much the technical difficulty as it was the emotional side," says Davis. "I became very close to Robert and though I was making a film, I would often have to put the camera down and be a friend." Davis completed filming just a week or so before Robert's death and she couldn't bring herself to look at the footage or begin editing until almost a year later.

Davis is completing a documentary for A&E on former death row inmates who have been exonerated and released from prison and won't be attending the Nashville debut of her film, though she says Maxwell, Cory, Stephanie and Cass will be in town for the screening. "At first they hated the way they looked on film," Davis says. "But now they all feel like they have done something good by being in this film. "

While some have criticized Davis for not skewering the doctors who refused to treat Robert, she says it was never her intent to turn Robert's life into an exposé. "I didn't want to make the film an indictment of the medical profession," she says. "I wanted instead to make the film a portrait of Robert's life because its normalcy is so surprising. Whether it's love, heartbreak, death or search for identity, his life was constructed of the same elements as everyone else."