Transition, an award-winning documentary by UTS alumni Jordan Bryon
Jordan Bryon’s latest film ‘Transition’ sees the director tell the story of his gender transition against the backdrop of Afghanistan’s 2021 Taliban takeover.
It’s hard to pin down Jordan Bryon, the lively, globetrotting director of Transition, which screened at the 70th Sydney Film Festival in June 2023 and premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Jordan’s cinematic eye and interest in seeking out stories and people from far and wide has seen him spend the last decade living and working across the Middle East, including Jordan, Lebanon, Türkiye, Tajikistan and, most recently, Afghanistan.
It was while living here that Jordan began his gender transition. In a strange twist of fate, the beginnings of Jordan’s transition coincided with the 2021 Taliban takeover of the country. While Jordan was undergoing a journey to affirm his identity, his chosen home was descending into a dark cloud of violence and repression.
Jordan’s powerful new feature documentary, Transition, plays in the duality of these transitory experiences. While it’s a life-affirming narrative, it also showcases the complex nature of the human condition, particularly in the fascinating relationship Jordan forms with a group of Taliban fighters he is embedded with.
During a rare trip back home to Australia, Jordan spoke with us about his experience since graduating from a Bachelor of Communication (Media Arts and Production) at UTS, his time in Afghanistan, and what he’s working on next.
Discovering documentary at UTS
Jordan began studying Media Arts and Production at UTS as a mature-age student, though he notes “I don’t know how mature I was at the time.” Close to the end of his study, he accompanied a fellow student to Uganda to make a documentary. This work centred around a Ugandan orphanage, questioning whether it was fair to rescue children in exchange for accepting God. This project indicates Jordan’s innate passion to explore social issues through film, a trend that echoes throughout his career.
After graduating, Jordan used his existing experience and contacts to work for community projects and organisations in film, creating new networks and further opportunities locally to continue to develop his unique vision.
Moving to the Middle East
It was after a conversation with a stranger in a bar that Jordan impulsively made the decision to move across the world to the country of Jordan, where he would begin to explore more narrative storytelling.
It was while based here that Jordan directed his first feature Birds of the Borderlands, a documentary about queer Arabs. However, backlash to the film’s content saw Jordan become something of a nomad, being deported from Jordan to Lebanon, then from Lebanon to Türkiye. It was in this period that Jordan decided to try for Afghanistan, successfully skirting past the usually strict border guards and securing a work visa.
Jordan’s life in Afghanistan saw him build a community of friends and colleagues, adopting the nation as his new home:
It’s a group of close friends and family, you build close bonds with people in those kinds of environments, I think. People work and party hard in a place like Afghanistan, so you’re always at dinners and parties, at some restaurant, so you meet people - and these friends that are in that scene are friends for life.
His career excelled also, with his work as director and cinematographer on a number of documentaries and TV series drawing acclaim, particularly Children of the Taliban, which Jordan co-directed with Marcel Mettelsiefen. This series won two BAFTAs, one for current affairs and one for photography.
The making of Transition
In 2021, when the country was again thrown into turmoil after the exit of US armed forces and resurgence of the Taliban, the question of safety arose. Many expats left, yet Jordan was determined to stay and work;
It wasn’t a hard decision, there wasn’t really a moment where I was going to leave…I’d lived in Afghanistan for five years at that point, and like I say in the film, I’d built my career, my bank account, my networks, my experiences in that country. And now that it was getting really real, it felt like time to dig my heels in and really do my job. And you know, this sounds corny, but I felt I owed it to the country.
And so he went to work, and alongside the filming he had already been doing around his gender transition, so too did Jordan began to document life in Afghanistan under Taliban rule.
I was just filming because I’m a filmmaker and like, you know, that’s what we do. We just shoot. Even if you don’t have a definite idea of what you’re shooting for or where it’s going.
Once this concept had taken root for Jordan, he and his team sought out funding, something that was helped with the inclusion of notable documentarian Matthew Heineman (Cartel Land, Retrograde) as an Executive Producer. This funding allowed Jordan and the crew to schedule a few more shoots and eventually get the footage sent to some editors in Brazil and Colombia. Here, the post-production crew had the daunting task of paring down over 200 hours of footage into a workable product.
The end result of six years of labour from Jordan and the exceptional team around him is the documentary Transition, currently touring film festivals around the world.
To my knowledge there aren’t that many trans people, you know, working on the front lines and whatnot. And while this film, this character Jordan, that’s not the whole experience, this is a film showing that trans people don’t need to be limited by the fact that they’re trans.
What’s next for Jordan Bryon?
With the release of Transition, Jordan is not able to return to Afghanistan for safety reasons. Because of this restriction, he now has a life in Bosnia, where he’s working on a project about immigrants making their way through the Balkans.
People are coming from Afghanistan, Iran, Morocco, making their way up through Türkiye, Greece, Bulgaria, and then through Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia. I’m going to dive into the issues they face, like the mafia that control these routes. The murdering, rape, stealing – people are getting abducted and forced into sex slavery or to work on farms.... And then the police at the border catch them, steal everything, strip them naked, shave their heads, spray an orange X on their head, and send them back. It’s really bad.
Jordan is already a visionary filmmaker, storyteller and documentarian who makes films that are “built on authenticity”. Whether he’s documenting the lives of queer Arabs in Jordan or his own gender transition under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. His powerful body of work speaks for itself.
I’m only interested in making films about stories that are going to add value to the world. I’m driven by social impact storytelling.
