Matia, a transgender woman, narrates her life: born as a boy, he started using lipstick at the age of 12, was beaten by school students, while the teacher told him: "Do you have to dress up as a fag?" He started feeling attracted to men: he expressed his feelings towards his friend, a guy, but the latter just started "ghosting" him. At college, he had longer hair and tried dating other men, but they would all just disappear. He contemplated suicide with pills. He dressed up in a skirt and long wig, but was almost raped in a night club. Finally, he decided he was a woman. She surrounded herself with nice people and friends, and continued with her new life as a woman.
A rare quality Croatian animated short film with a rare topic about transgender transformation, Marko Djeska's "All Those Sensations in my Belly" is a story that somehow hits you hard. The animation is "caricature" and simplified, but that emotional experience that it is presenting is incredible. In only 13 minutes, it chornicles the heroine's account of slowly coming to terms that he was born as a boy, but wanted to be a woman. The visual representation of her feelings is creative: in one sequence, while she was still a teenage guy, he gave a birthday present to his friend, but as he kissed him, he experienced "sensations" in his stomach, depicted with thousands of red blood cells floating in a "river", going through his hands or through his stomach, as the whole background becomes white, transporting him into "another world". Djeska shows this story as it is narrated, objective, and yet with understanding. This is the path the heroine felt was honest to her, and she decided to take it, regardless of all the obstacles. She simply felt it needed to be this way, even though she herself didn't understand why. The heroine went to several dates during college, but all of them abandoned her and never called back, depicted in such scenes as she having a drink in a bar with a man who "disappears" while his glass falls down, or going out with a man who "disappears" while his ice cream falls on her trousers in the middle of the walk. The pivotal sequence is the surreal illustration of her transformation to a woman: her arm emerges from the ground and she exits, looking back at her male body lying there in the forest, with a hole in the chest, as if she shedded her skin and went on to be a woman from now on. The story is sad and depressive, but Djeska showed it in a beautiful and poetic way, with all those abstract colors and cinematic depictions that expressed her emotions.
Grade:+++
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