Octopus Alarm
Octopus Alarm
| 11 February 2006 (USA)
Octopus Alarm Trailers

Alex is intersex. Although he has XY chromosomes, his sex is ambiguous. When Alex was an infant, his mother authorised genital reassignment surgery, and he was thereafter raised female. Now Alex is an adult, and he is consumed by feelings of anger and loss. After meeting other "XY women" and doing a lot of soul-searching, he decides he wants to live as a man.

Reviews
film_riot

This film by Austrian filmmaker Elisabeth Scharang is about Alex, who was born with ambiguous gender and shows his development into a person, who makes his own decisions. In the course of the film the audience can experience how Alex gets more and more confident to also talk about private things in front of the camera and how he begins to really choose what he does. It was very interesting for me, because I followed this story since the beginning, which was at the Austrian radio station FM4. In a weekly show Alex called in for the first time and it was in 2002 that Elisabeth Scharang, who also works at FM4, invited Alex for her show. After that Alex and Scharang developed a close relationship (at least as far as I can see it) and that is also the key to why a film, so small and private as "Tintenfischalarm", can tell us so much about our society. Maybe it's too long and it never really dragged me in totally, but it's interesting and important.

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