A trans woman gets out of bed and pads across the room to the bathroom. She is naked. She goes to the bathroom. She brushes her teeth. It is a ritual I've performed so many times without a second thought, and now I'm watching it in a movie. I am struck by how commonplace this feels, how incredibly normal. I notice that her body isn't that different from mine. This is not a hyper-sexualized porn star; this is a regular transgender woman living a regular life. Our bodies are so often fetishized that it feels wholly transgressive to see a nude trans woman on screen simply existing - not being used as a sex object or an object of pity, just another woman going through motions that feel so mundane yet so familiar.

Australian filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay was not yet 18 when her debut feature, So Vam, premiered in 2021. Now 20, Mackay has a staggering five feature films under her belt, a filmography that has quickly become one of most thrilling and radical bodies of work by a queer filmmaker in ages.

If we don't tell our own stories - who will? For a film like Satranic Panic, an indie Australian horror film directed by a 19-year-old trans woman, its very existence feels like an act of rebellion. It's certainly messy, its edges ragged and unrefined, but that DIY aesthetic is part of what makes it feel so authentic. What director Alice Maio Mackay (who has now made five feature films before the age of 20) is doing here is reclaiming trans stories from cis framework.