Robert was born female. Lola was born male. Now, they are falling in love...but time is running out.
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Rarely has a film garnered such high levels of critical praise as Southern Comfort, a breakout hit and winner at nearly 20 major film festivals including the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. From Seattle to Florida, from San Francisco to Berlin, Southern Comfort has mesmerized audiences and critics alike with its rare blend of humor, tragedy, and romance. At the heart of Southern Comfort is a beautiful and remarkable love story, more touching and captivating than anything fiction could ever create. With a masterful eye for emotional detail, award-winning filmmaker Kate Davis takes us to the back hills of Georgia and into the world of Robert Eads, a 52-year-old wise-cracking cowboy, warm and gregarious, who was born female and later transitioned into living as a man after bearing two sons. The film finds Robert fifteen years later, during the extraordinary last year of his life, as he falls headlong into a passionate romance with Lola, a vivacious and magnetic woman who was born male. One of the most remarkable documentaries of our time about gender, family, and love relationships, Southern Comfort is an illuminating and deeply moving film--a world of contradictions where good old boys who drive pick-up trucks and shoot the breeze around the barbecue double as 21st century pioneers, courageously forging a new world for themselves, and for us.
Editor's Note
For her film SOUTHERN COMFORT, veteran documentarian Kate Davis found a rare subject in Robert Eads, a 52-year-old female-to-male transsexual living in Tuccoa, Georgia. Eads, a charming, laconic cowboy apparently "male" enough to once be propositioned to join the Ku Klux Klan, began life as a female, married, had two sons, and lived as a lesbian before finally transitioning into the heterosexual man that he always felt he really was. In a bitter irony, however, Eads died of cervical and ovarian cancer--betrayed, as he puts it, by the last part of himself that was still female.Davis follows the last year in Eads's life, a momentous one in which he falls in love with Lola Cola (a male-to-female trans) and says goodbye to the adopted family of transsexuals whom he has sheperded for years. And he lives long enough to attend one final convention of Southern Comfort, an organization of about 500 transsexuals from around the South. Davis never gets on a soapbox; in fact, she's entirely unobstrusive, since she had to eschew funding (time was short already when she met Eads) and shoot the entire film herself on digital video. Her subjects, meanwhile, challenge endless stereotypes--they're self-procalimed "trailer trash" who are nevertheless forging a new culture of gender.
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