Red Without Blue 

Full length Documentary 

2007 

77 Minutes 

Directed by: Brooke Sebold, Benita Sills, Todd Sills 

4 Stars 

Reviewer: Kindah Mardam Bey  

If you are no longer a teen but past the age of twenty, you will remember vividly the colour coding of siblings by their parents. As if a family of two children could not be deciphered without the markings of a ‘red’ or ‘blue’ bow tie. Even more typical than the primary colour palette for different aged siblings, was the incessant display of ‘different but the same’ quota for twins. So too did Mark and Alex individuals sharing the mirrored image of identical faces amidst the same colour spectrum, but on opposite ends. Red Without Blue, a revealing title to a documentary that illustrates the life of twin brothers growing up in the boring and urbane existence of rural Montana. Beneath the surface of normality Mark and Alex tumultuous and almost tortured youth has set a path of gender identity, confusion at times and a mountain of hurt for all involved that is waded through in this documentary that spans three years post high-school.  

Born in 1983, Mark and Alex were the twin boys of a perfect family portrait, except for the niggling fact that their Mother suspicianed they were gay even when they were in Kindergarten. After a family divorce and teen angst at its most confusing Alex decided to become Clair and Mark who followed his Mother’s suspicions revealed he is gay, moved to San Francisco and changed his name to Oliver. The documentary follows the path of these twins in their early twenties at school and amidst a challenging life they are struggling to make sense of as individuals and as a family. I suspect my Gender Studies class Professor from University is salivating somewhere over the context and subject matter of this film!   

A family torn by crisis and unconventional changes actually reveal how deeply bonded they are to each other. Some might pigeon hole this documentary as a story of gender and transformation, but I saw this film as a triumphant story of a loving normal family with dysfunctional issues they are all facing within themselves and each other. Clair, Oliver, Mum and Dad Farley are simply an extreme example of that struggle that the majority of families cope with, making Red Without Blue a universal and encompassing story.         

Red Without Blue is a provocative, insightful, reflective and unabashed documentary of life in its most raw and truthful form. These beginner documentary filmmakers Brooke Sebold, Benita Sills, and Todd Sills seemed to bring the correct amount of unpolished and hard edged filmmaking that a documentary needs to be. The film avoided hazing over subjects and glossing through experiences, yet the film was not over sensationalized or turned into a mandate for gay pride. It was unflinching, accurate and filled with truthful emotions and all the messy descriptives that go with those emotions. Red Without Blue wasn’t a film trying to make a point, it is a film trying to explore a question.  

Scenes like Mum Farley admitting the distance she feels towards her children is simply heartbreaking, an old school friend Clair knows who has gone through a sex change recently shows both Clair and the audience the ups and downs of the transformation. Father Farley’s hurt at his young teens decision to commit suicide and in the eye of the storm Clair and Oliver trying to find their identity a nations’ width apart from each other only to recognize the bond and reliance they have towards their twin makes this film worth watching. Clair says it best about her own life and her families’ experiences when she explains about her sex change; it is not so much the final result of being a woman that matters to her, but the process of that transformation is what she was born to live and learn from.