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Kuwait, a region where homosexuality is illegal, has been known to ban films which contain any LGBTQ scenes, references, or imagery, including Everything Everywhere All at Once, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Pixar’s Onward. But by blocking the release of A24 horror film Talk to Me, the country has crossed a new frontier in censorship.
Kuwait’s decision to ban Talk to Me, a horror movie that boasts A24’s biggest opening since Hereditary, is based solely on the gender identity of one of the film’s stars, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. The movie features Zoe Terakes, who identifies as nonbinary and trans masculine, and announced their gender confirming surgery in 2022. Terakes’s gender identity not a plot point in Talk to Me; in fact, it isn’t mentioned at all. And although the film has been released without any alteration across other Gulf territories, Terakes’s mere presence in the feature is apparently enough to warrant its blockage in Kuwait.
“We stand in solidarity with Zoe Terakes following the decision by Kuwait to ban the film Talk to Me,” said Causeway Films, the movie’s producer, and Bankside Films, its sales agent, in a joint statement to THR. “Zoe has made their own statement, which we fully support, and we are immensely proud of their involvement in the film.”
Over the weekend, 23-year-old Terakes, who became the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first transgender actor when they were cast in the the TV series Ironheart, shared their reaction to the ban on social media. “I am a trans actor who happened to get the role. I’m not a theme. I’m a person. Kuwait has banned this film due to my identity alone,” they wrote. “It is targeted and dehumanizing and means to harm us.”
They continued: “As much as it is very sad to be on the receiving end of this, what is even more heartbreaking is what this precedent means for the queer and trans people of Kuwait. Eliminating trans actors on screens will not eliminate trans people (as much as the government of Kuwait wishes it would) but it will eliminate a lot of hope. And hope is such a large part of how we live as marginalized people. It’s how we learn to move through the hatred and the mistreatment and the violence.”
Terakes concluded, “Therefore, our survival is so dependent on our ability to look to each other, to share with each other, to lean on each other, to love each other, to see each other. My heart breaks for the trans people and queer people of Kuwait who have so few places to look.”
