Educational Media Reviews Online

The first of this pair of well-intentioned and modestly-produced awareness-raising efforts is a rather negligible thesis film profiling several teenagers involved in Outlet, a Bay Area support organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning (LGBTQQ) youth of ages 13 to 20. A gay student activist, a transgender teen and the assistant director of Outlet feature most prominently among the students, counselors, teachers and parents who variously relate how they constructively cope with the confusions, hostilities and obstacles non-heterosexual teenagers continue to face in school throughout the United States.

Though fast-paced and perhaps also too compact, the Canadian Calling Nate is less cursory and considerably more engaging than Outlet not least because its subject is Nadia Hluszko, an infectiously sympathetic 18 year-old grappling with gender identity confusions. The film captures the sprightly and sensitive self-named Nate as she negotiates a variety of further complicating factors in her life—her fitful efforts to complete school, woes over her breakup with a girlfriend, a transsexual father, an estranged mother, and the ramifying loss of a younger sister. By confining herself to the particular circumstances of Nate’s life, an engagement is firmly established with issues of gender identity that extend well beyond the film’s humble limits.