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What can one say about oneself before day breaks? Halfway between documentary and fiction, this portrait sprang out of a longstanding complicity between the filmmaker and the Japanese-Brazilian trans actress Julia Katharine, whom he had already filmed. The conversation begins in her flat, but not before a narcissistic check-up tinged with self-derision: “Do I look good?” Julia’s romantic and sexual past, which quickly comes up, is systematically dismissed in an ultimately good-natured game of “hide and seek”. For instance, in “scene 2, take 2”, she dons a geisha-style kimono before suggesting that this was at the filmmaker’s pointlessly exotic demand. The monologue recalls the jubilant tone of Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason, which the actress may in fact have seen: her love of cinema emerges at all the junctions of her autobiographical narrative. Her stage name? Inspired by Katharine Hepburn. Her budgie? Compared with the budgies that Tippi Heddren buys at the beginning of The Birds. The relationship with her mother? A mutual dependency similar to that in Terms of Endearment starring Shirley MacLaine… The wild digressions and cinematic references are revealed as instruments to facilitate the plasticity of an identity that stands as a defence against the violence towards trans people. Be it anecdotes or confided secrets, a political thread is woven, and a cinephile turns into a filmmaker – “Action!” (Charlotte Garson)