Kerwin Spivey's New Orleans Love Letter in Film

Kerwin Spivey doesn't make films for people who want their queerness served gentle and digestible. His documentaries excavate the parts of New Orleans that don't fit neatly into the tourism board's glossy brochures, the parts that make straight audiences uncomfortable and queer audiences recognize themselves in ways that feel dangerous. Spivey's work will screen at the New Orleans Film Festival this fall—a coup for an independent filmmaker working outside the usual circuit of major festivals and streaming platforms. The film, which centers on trans and non-binary residents navigating survival in the city, marks a deliberate departure from the kind of LGBTQ storytelling that has dominated mainstream media for the past decade. There are no uplift narratives here, no triumphant arcs where the marginalized overcome through sheer willpower and a good attitude. Instead, Spivey trains his lens on the actual texture of queer life in New Orleans: the economic precarity, the medical discrimination, the way the city's beauty can feel like a luxury item when you're already struggling to pay rent. "I grew up here," Spivey said during a recent conversation at a coffee shop in the Marigny area. "I watched people I loved disappear. I watched the city change in ways that felt designed to push us out. I wasn't interested in making a feel-good documentary. I was interested in making something honest." Honesty, in Spivey's hands, becomes a radical act. His previous work—a series of short documentaries shot between 2019 and 2022—examined the lives of drag performers working in bars across the city, focusing specifically on the economic realities behind the glamour. He interviewed dancers about healthcare costs, about the violence they'd experienced, about what it meant to perform femininity in a city where trans women face disproportionate rates of harassment and assault. The films circulated in queer film festivals and community screenings, but never reached the kind of mainstream attention that outlets like The Advocate or LGBTQ Nation typically reserve for narratives about LGBTQ success stories. Here in New Orleans, though, Spivey's work became essential viewing—the kind of cinema that queer residents recognized as their own, not a version of their lives packaged for national consumption. What distinguishes Spivey's approach is his refusal to position his subjects as victims in need of rescue. The people in his films are experts on their own lives. They speak directly to the camera. They set the terms of their own narratives. Spivey's role is to listen, to document, to bear witness—not to interpret or explain away the complexity of what he's capturing. The new film, which premiered at a smaller regional festival earlier this year, expands this methodology. Over eighteen months, Spivey followed five trans and non-binary residents through various moments in their lives: medical appointments, family dinners, nights out, quiet mornings at home. He didn't impose a narrative arc. He simply let time unfold. The resulting film is deliberately paced, sometimes boring in ways that feel intentional—a rejection of the aesthetic choices that typically govern documentary cinema. There are long stretches where nothing dramatic happens. There are conversations that circle back on themselves. There is the texture of actual living. "Documentary has a problem," Spivey explained. "We've been trained to expect conflict, resolution, some kind of emotional climax. But life doesn't work that way. Especially queer life in a place like New Orleans. It's a lot of waiting. It's a lot of small moments. It's a lot of figuring out how to survive another day. I wanted the film to feel like that." The New Orleans Film Festival screening represents a significant moment for Spivey's career. The festival, held annually in October, draws filmmakers and audiences from across the region and beyond. It's a venue where experimental work finds an audience, where documentary gets treated as an art form rather than a vehicle for social messaging. For Spivey, it's validation that his approach—unglamorous, patient, locally rooted—matters beyond the immediate community that produced it. Yet Spivey remains skeptical of what festival success might mean. He's watched other local filmmakers get absorbed into the machinery of film festivals and production companies, their work gradually shifting to appeal to broader audiences, their edges sanded down. He's determined not to let that happen to his own practice. "I make films for New Orleans," he said. "That's the primary audience. If other people want to watch them, fine. But I'm not going to change what I'm doing because some festival programmer in another city thinks it needs to be more accessible." This commitment to localism runs deep. Spivey shoots on the streets where he grew up, in bars and apartments and parks that hold specific meaning for the people in his films. He works with small crews, often just himself and one or two collaborators. He funds projects through a combination of grants, community fundraising, and his own resources. He refuses to chase the kind of production budgets that would require him to compromise his vision or answer to producers with commercial interests. The New Orleans Film Festival screening happens on October 14th at a venue in the CBD. After the screening, there will be a conversation between Spivey and a local film scholar. It's the kind of intimate, unglamorous event that characterizes Spivey's entire approach to filmmaking—no red carpet, no celebrity guests, just cinema and conversation and the people who care enough to show up. For anyone who's tired of seeing queer stories filtered through a national lens, who's hungry for cinema that reflects the actual complexity of being queer in this specific place, Spivey's work offers something rare: a filmmaker who refuses to make it easier for you, who trusts you enough to sit with discomfort, who believes that the lives of trans and non-binary people in New Orleans matter not because they're inspirational, but because they're real.