Port Authority is a new film, but also not a new film. Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, it is only now playing, in select theaters, for the first time since its debut at Cannes in 2019. That premiere made history as Leyna Bloom became the first out transgender actor to headline a film at that legendary film festival.

“This is something I've always wanted to do,” said Bloom in a phone interview prior to the movie’s release. She plays Wye, a 17-year-old trans girl of color who meets Paul, played by Fionn Whitehead, upon his arrival at the titular Manhattan bus terminal. Wye introduces the newly homeless teen from America’s Rust Belt to her kiki ballroom scene. Love blossoms, and complexities follow.

Art Imitates Life

The characters’ experiences portrayed in the film are not that far off from Bloom’s real life. As reported by The Advocate’s Trudy Ring, Bloom arrived at the Port Authority terminal at 17 without a job or a place to live, a high school drop-out from Chicago who walked away from a scholarship at a performing arts academy because she was restricted to male roles. In between waiting tables and modeling, Bloom found a family and a showcase for her talents in ballrooms from New York to Philadelphia.

“I feel like I've always been out, in a sense,” Bloom told me. “I’ve always been me; I've always been out. I've never been in the closet, actually. I think the world just started noticing me.”

And that notice is indeed global: Bloom was the first out trans woman of color to appear in Vogue India, the first Black and Asian trans woman to be featured in the annual Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, and was also featured in a short film series for the “Dior Stands with Women” campaign. Bloom is now appearing in this third and final season of FX’s critically-acclaimed television series, Pose, and next month is among the stars of Asking For It, premiering online June 13 at the Tribeca Film Festival.

As a child, her mother was deported to the Philippines and she was raised by her single father, a now retired Chicago cop of French and Nigerian ancestry. “I'm a product of interracial dating,” said Bloom. “I have to remind myself always that we live in a world where I think most people like me, accomplishing all this, being young and doing it, it’s been kind of hard,” Bloom said. “So, I’m lucky that the world is changing so that my dream can come true, and it has come true.”

Directing Debut

“What was interesting about Layna is that every single take she gave something that was breathtaking, but in a different way,” said writer/director Danielle Lessovitz, who makes her feature film debut with Port Authority, which has already been nominated for nine awards and won 2020’s Best Feature Film Award at LesGaiCineMad, the Madrid International LGBT Film Festival. The film will also be available on digital and on demand Tuesday, June 1.

“I worked with her in auditions,” Lessovitz said, of which there were many, according to Bloom. “I knew that she could listen and I knew that she could respond in an authentic way. But I didn't know that take after take, she could bring out these new layers in every performance. And so when we got into the edit room, it was like just having a wealth of options and different moments. And it was incredible working with her.”

Lessovitz told me in a phone interview she got this break in large part because someone pushed her to take a chance that legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese would bankroll her debut.

“He started a fund for young filmmakers and they were looking for projects,” said the San Francisco native, an MFA graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. A classmate there believed Lessovitz had just the kind of project that Scorsese was looking for.

“They asked me to send the script and they read it and they really appreciated it, and he almost instantly jumped on board,” she said.

Make Room For Mother

Lessovitz’s script did not originally include the character of Mother McQueen, the house mother of Wye's ballroom family. But she told me that during auditions, as Christopher “Afrika” Quarles offered his advice to prospective actors, she realized she needed to find a place for the real-life kiki ball legend in her film.

“I need to make a role for Afrika, because, you know, they’re a gem,” Lessovitz said. “I don't know that people have actually kind of witnessed how great they are. And I was almost extracting stuff they had said to me or to other people and just placing it in the film and letting letting them do their thing, just being an incredibly insightful human being.”

“When I hear myself speaking in this role, I'm like, ‘This is me. This is me, as who I am in ballroom.’” said Afrika in a phone interview. “I'm a mother. I’m a father to some, but a mother to most. That line, ‘I know I may look like a father but I'm a mother by nature,’ because I've always known how to nurture and guide.”

Afrika, 33, graduated from North Carolina’s Shaw University and moved to New York City in their 20s. In addition to their work in the ballroom and with non-profit organizations aiding HIV-positive members of the LGBTQ community, they were featured in the music videos for Follow Me by The Shacks, the Grammy Record of the Year nominated Colors by Black Pumas, Titus Burgess’ Learn to Love, and also appeared in Pose. If that show’s iconic Pray Tell character, played by award-winning actor Billy Porter, could announce any ballroom category for them to compete in, what would it be?

“Oooh! My category would be Runway!” they said. “I've been told that when I walk, people say it's like there's like a herd of animals following behind me.”

“It’s About Love”

Bloom said more than anything, Port Authority tells the story of “a love that's different from everyone else who only see black and white.”

“The world is changing,” she said. “When you add people of trans experience in Black and brown America, the world becomes closer, and that’s what this film’s about: It's about love. It's about family. And it's about bringing people that are missing from society front and center. And the people who watch this, I hope that they love themselves more, and they spread that out to the world around them.”

What the film is not, said Lessovitz, is yet another version of the “Mystical Magical Negro” trope that Spike Lee first slammed in 2001. In a lecture at Yale, the famed director of Do The Right Thing criticized popular movies like The Family Man, What Dreams May Come, The Legend of Bagger Vance and The Green Mile, for relying upon a secondary, supporting Black character to redeem the white protagonist character in those films.

“I saw Wye as a person and I saw Paul as someone who is very flawed. In Wye’s own humanity, Paul could begin to see his blind spots,” Lessovitz told me. Whitehead’s experience as an actor certainly helped convey his shortcomings; he’s also appeared in Dunkirk, Netflix’s Blackmirror: Bandersnatch and the Neil Burger film Voyagers.

The director said the best way to avoid any trope is “when you stop using people, when you stop looking at people as a means to an end, but you start honoring their humanity.

“People catch a lot in non-verbal moments,” she added. “I don't need Wye’s character to go on a long monologue about her experiences, in her case, for her to be a person. We feel that she's not there just to bring someone on this magical journey. It’s about honoring the spirit and the beauty of the people who come in and out of your life.”

As a queer filmmaker, Lessovitz spoke to me about her ambition to reach audiences beyond LGBTQ moviegoers.

“You and I are part of the queer community, but there's this hope that we can find a way to be more inclusive towards people who aren’t queer and don't have our experiences,” Lessovitz told me. “I'm trying to take anyone on an experience of understanding that what seems like differences can also be—if you just look at them a little bit closer—can also be the things that connect each other.

“So, in this case, you have someone who is white and he’s been marginalized in different ways,” she said, describing Paul’s character. “He hasn't had access to education. He doesn't have a family. All these things that a lot of people can relate to and say, ‘Hey, maybe this is part of just the human experience.’ There are things that we share in common in terms of struggles that may be more important than gay or not gay, or trans or not trans, or white or not white or Black or not white. There are other kind of experiences that we can base our identities on that might provide spaces for conversation, or bring us together in ways that are just sort of hard to access right now.”

Watch the trailer for Port Authority below: