I’m Just Anneke

I’m Just Anneke is a portrait of a 12-year-old girl who loves ice hockey and has a loving, close-knit family. Anneke is also a hardcore tomboy and everybody she meets assumes she’s a boy. The onset of puberty has created an identity crisis for Anneke. Does she want to be a boy or a girl when she grows up, or something in between? To give her more time to make a decision, her doctor has put her on Lupron, a hormone blocker that temporarily freezes her body in a pre-pubescent state.

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Despite rejection by her friends and struggles with suicidal depression, Anneke is determined to be true to herself and maintain a gender fluid identity that matches what she feels on the inside. “Anneke” takes us into the heart of a new generation of children who are intuitively questioning the binary gender paradigm.

Jonathan Skurnik has produced, directed and shot numerous award-winning documentaries and has recently completed his first two fiction films as writer/director. His most recent documentaries include: Something’s Moving, about American Indian boarding schools, that won the Unspoken Truth award at the 2008 Media That Matters film festival; The Elevator Operator, about a Ukrainian immigrant who runs a manual elevator in Manhattan, has screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, won Best Documentary at the Urban TV film festival in Madrid and had its broadcast premiere on PBS and Ukrainian TV; the award-winning Spit It Out, the life story of a man who stutters, was broadcast on PBS in 2007; and A Day’s Work, A Day’s Pay, about welfare reform, won the prestigious Harry Chapin award for films about hunger and poverty and was broadcast on PBS and in Europe in 2002. Jonathan is currently directing a series of short films about transgender and gender fluid youth.