Call Me Madame (1986)

Gallic filmmaker Françoise Romand helmed this unusual French-language human interest documentary in 1986. The work travels to a small French village, where a male Communist activist with an apparently... read more  happy marriage and family decides to become a transsexual with his wife's unbridled support. The subject ultimately renames himself Ovida Delecte . Meanwhile, the couple's teenage son harbors some serious reservations about his father's transsexuality. At the time of its production, this work (like Romand's prior success d'estime, The Mix-Up) was one of the first to promulgate an unusual film form that Romand would continue to develop throughout her career, which she dubbed "fictional documentary." As the name suggests, this controversial form witnesses the director filming actual people talking about their lives, but makes fervent use of staged scenes and predetermined dialogue. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi