My name is Eduardo Iris. I am from Brazil. I am doing my graduate studies here in
the United States and the University of Utah, and I will be the director of the
Chasing the Dragon.
As a filmmaker, I'm interested in two different kinds of genres. One is the
thriller genre and the other one will be the LGBT, or this intersection between
law enforcement and gender identity. I believe the most interesting part in
the Chasing the Dragon is how you have this character that is a transgender
actress or transgender actor that is inserted in a male world, a male
environment, and how this very conservative atmosphere shapes the
character in some way. So Chasing the Dragon born when I met this transgender
detective in California, so she is the head of an international organization of
the transgender police officers. When we entered in contact with her, we saw that
there was more than 5,000 transgender police officers working in the United
States. Julie, Julie Callahan, she has been together with us doing all the
process of the film, doing all the screenwriting, and there's when Chasing the
Dragon born. I believe this film is important right now considering the
political and social aspects of the United States, not just the United States
but in the world, how transgender people is treated as second-class citizens.
Here in the United States, we're going to have the military transgender band, we're
going to have the issue with the bathrooms. So transgender people in our
society are ostracized. They have very few opportunities in life because of
their identity and I believe in media they are very wrongly portrayed. Starting
because transgender people is almost no existent in media, you know, as characters
and when they are, they are mostly comedic relief or they are just resumed to
their transition from one gender to another. And Chasing the Dragon is not
about the transition of this police officer, this detective, this detective
already transition and about the life after the transition. So right now we
just finished the script, we locked the script and we have a very good team of
people working with us. We have Angela Chalmers that's going to be our director
of photography, she is an amazing cinematographer, I'm very happy to have her
on the team. We have James Westerfeld who has worked in many short films before
like he's a writer, he's also in the team, he has working with me in the script
he is my co-writer. Also Jose Ramirez is with us, he's gonna be the producer and
I'm very glad to say that he and Alex Chapman and me are going to be on the
Sundance Lembens this year to try to promote our film. So Chasing the Dragon
is about prejudice, it's about discrimination, it's about misogyny,
transphobia, I think the word needs more characters, more transgender characters
in film, they need to be portrayed in a good lighting, they need to have a voice
and I think our movie the short film is going to be the voice from these people
that has been ostracized. I want to tell their story, I want to tell the story of
transgender people in the law enforcement.
