Tangerine (2015)

Pride Film Series

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NYT Critic’s Pick: “Little is as it seems in Tangerine, a fast, raucously funny comedy about love and other misadventures…Tangerine encompasses dizzying multitudes — it’s a neo-screwball chase flick with a dash of Rainer Werner Fassbinder — but mostly, movingly, it is a female-friendship movie about two people who each started life with an XY chromosome set.” — Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“A reinvigorating reminder of what indie filmmaking can — and should — do.” — David Ehrlich

You might know the modern wunderkind-cum-Oscar-winning director Sean Baker from his delightful The Florida Project or the Best Picture–winner Anora, but his roots are in microbudget indie filmmaking, and this 2015 breakout (made for a mere $100,000 and shot entirely on an iPhone) showcases his technical ingenuity, love of classical narrative propulsion, and rigorous empathy in spades. Unfolding over the course of a single Christmas Eve in Los Angeles, Tangerine adopts the picaresque momentum of a screwball odyssey, following trans sex worker Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) as she tears through the city in search of her unfaithful boyfriend and pimp, with her steadfast friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor), also a trans woman, in tow. What begins as a profane, high-velocity revenge quest gradually reveals itself as something richer: a street-level symphony of intersecting lives, precarious economies, and fiercely maintained bonds of care.