What Will I Become?

What Will I Become? opens not with a trigger warning but with an invocation of communal care: “If the film’s themes of loss or harm speak to your experience, may this be a reminder you are not alone. Thank you for being here.” That gesture sets the tone for a documentary that does not simply present its subject as information to be absorbed, but as a shared and urgent reality to be held with tenderness. Co-directed by Lexie Bean and Logan Rozos, the film confronts the devastating fact that more than 50% of transgender boys attempt suicide, arriving at a time when legislative hostility toward trans people, especially trans youth, remains brutally intense.

Rather than placing themselves at a clinical distance, Bean and Rozos shape the documentary through intimacy. In a warmly and softly lit room, made into a kind of safe haven with a blanket fort and string lights, they navigate their own feelings as survivors of suicide attempts. These personal reflections are interwoven with the stories of two trans boys who died by suicide, Blake Brockington and Kyler Prescott. The result is both a work of mourning and a searching attempt to understand the pressures, cruelties, and isolations that make such losses possible.

The contrast between the two stories is shaped not only by geography, with Blake in the Carolinas and Kyler in California, but by the material each life left behind. Blake appears through archival interviews recorded before his death, giving his voice and presence a painful immediacy. Kyler, who did not like to be filmed, is brought closer through photographs, a single piano recital recording, and evocative stop-motion animation. In both cases, the people who knew and loved the boys are interviewed, but Kyler’s story is especially moving in the way it is defined by absence, by the empty space he left behind, and by the sorrow that fills the recollections of his parents.

What makes What Will I Become? so powerful is not only its urgency but also its humility. Bean and Rozos do not adopt a pedagogical posture, nor do they flatten their subject into a lesson for outsiders. Their approach is marked by care, grief, and lived understanding. Because both directors are survivors themselves, the documentary carries an emotional integrity that might have been impossible in more detached hands. It does not explain trans pain from the outside. It sits with it, listens to it, and tries to make room for it without exploiting it.

At the same time, the documentary insists on showing trans life beyond despair. It highlights the ingenuity and mutual care through which trans people build ways to survive in a hostile world, from a puppeteer who creates packers disguised as puppets, allowing trans boys to keep them without revealing their utility, to Trans Lifeline, presented as an alternative to police involvement and hospitalization, both of which can be especially harmful for trans people in crisis. These glimpses of adaptation and solidarity deepen the portrait, showing not only what trans youth are up against but also the forms of care their communities create.

One of the film’s most devastating reflections comes when one of the co-directors recalls, “Before I came out I had never seen or heard of a trans man over the age of 35.” In that sentence lies the terror of an imaginable future denied. Yet What Will I Become? ends on a note of hard-won brightness. There are trans men who make it past 35. There are trans men who go on hikes, build lives, and imagine futures for themselves. In a world intent on making those futures feel unreachable, the title becomes both a question and an act of defiance. To ask what one will become is itself imperative, and perhaps it must be asked for those like Blake and Kyler who were never given the chance.

Reviewed on: 30 Mar 2026