Athos

1929. Eight thousand men are living in the monastic community of Mount Athos. For a thousand years no female has been allowed to set foot there. No hen. No cow. No she-goat – and certainly no women. Then Maryse Choisy, undercover reporter, smuggles herself onto the mountain disguised as a man.

The resulting book, Un Mois Chez Les Hommes was a sensation in France. But the book also hinted at a more serious project, one that extended over the course of Choisy’s life in the form of a mercurial dialogue between the liberated findings of psychoanalysis and the conservatism of religious life. In it, she writes: ‘I wanted to get out of myself, be another. No matter who, no matter what. But no longer myself, what a pleasure. To be in another skin.’

2016: Almost a century later, orthodoxy in religion is again asserting the definition of male and female as polarities. While gender fluidity, the possibility of expressing an identity beyond binary oppositions, of literally living in another skin, has revolutionised what gender really means.

For Athos Choisy’s argument between liberation and orthodoxy frames a playful visual essay about the possibilities of multiplicity.

Director: Sarah Wood. UK, 2016, video, 12 mins