SXSW ’26: Amy Jenkins and Adam Sieswerda Talk Passage of Time in Adam's Apple
This interview was originally posted on Film Obsessive.
Time is fleeting. As soon as you’re aware of the moment you’re in, it’s over. The magic of film is that it allows you to preserve a moment in life. While it may have ended, it lives forever in this pixelated version of itself. In the SXSW-premiering documentary Adam’s Apple, Amy Jenkins says, “I just love watching the passage of time.” Jenkins is the director of the film and a participant in it. Adam’s Apple follows the adolescence and transition of Adam Sieswerda. The documentary spans more than two decades as Adam, a transgender teen, and his family process immense change.
Not only is Adam’s Apple a staggering documentary about the experience of a trans man, but it is a wonderful artifact of a family. Not every scene is about Adam and his transition. Often it’s just a family enjoying each other’s company. As an outsider, it’s remarkable to see these personal moments. As a member of the family and a documentarian, Jenkins describes the final product as “an absolute privilege.”
“It’s a beautiful testament to our family and to our home. It’s our own personal scrapbook that we’re sharing with the world,” explains Jenkins.
“For myself, watching it through all the different versions we had and watching it now, I love being able to sit and look back at myself,” says Sieswerda. “To see the way I changed, our family, and growing up in general. How that space allowed me to question the roles that gender, memory, family, and life have had in my transformations. I’m also incredibly happy for it to be out in the public sphere and not just a personal thing I can self-reflect on. I want these questions to be asked by many different people.”
To continuously film over the course of eight years is a massive undertaking. Anyone who has started a project will say that starting is one thing, but continuing in a consistent manner is an entirely different beast. One would think it would be similarly difficult for Jenkins and Sieswerda, but Adam’s Apple began as a personal memento before it morphed into something larger.
“A good portion of the years was really just us living and filming. I’ve had a camera with me my whole life,” says Jenkins. “It was a process that really began unintentionally. Much more like home movies but without a project in mind. The actual making of the film in a more intentional way came together in the last several years when we were sitting down together, editing, and working with Adam as an adult.”
“The process, obviously, kept changing and growing because, as Adam matured, he became more interested in taking on filming himself and writing music,” continues Jenkins. “We had no idea how anything was going to happen until it was happening at that moment.”
“When we started to look at this footage and put together a movie, I was very much thinking back on being a teenager and wanting to see stories about people who were exactly like me. People who were trans like me, growing up in joy,” offers Sieswerda. “Having the story not just be them transitioning and their struggle in the transition, but also just them growing up.”
“What kept me going in huge Zoom sessions where we would go over every single scene of hours of footage was thinking that this was a story we’re lucky to have the footage for,” Sieswerda goes on. “Things like this are hard to find. It’s something that I know I needed deeply when I was younger, and so I would love to be able to contribute to that narrative.”
Kristina Motwani is the editor for Adam’s Apple. She spent hours on marathon Zoom sessions with Jenkins and Sieswerda to craft the narrative of the documentary. While Jenkins and Sieswerda lived through these years physically, it’s almost like Motwani did as well. Jenkins “absolutely” considers her a member of the family at this point.
“She hasn’t been to the house yet, but she’s like, I know every room in that house. It’s true,” smiles Jenkins. “Working with Kristina was amazing. We did have hundreds of hours of footage, but we also identified pretty quickly the most important scenes that we wanted in the film.”
“From there, it was a very collaborative effort. Once the first assembly was laid out, we would have Zoom sessions every week or two with the whole team,” adds Jenkins. “With Adam, Kristina, myself, and our producer, Brit Fryer. Sometimes our story consultant, Carter Sickels, would hop on and we would talk through every scene in the film. Sometimes for 8 or 10 hours.”
“Then Kristina would go back to the drawing board and create a new rough cut,” says Jenkins. “It was an unusual editing process because it was almost like editing by committee. We would all have our input. Also, because Adam and I are very close to the material, we needed other people’s eyes. To have Brit and Carter also on the team helped, because then we also had two other trans men to give their perspective.”
courtesy of Amy Jenkins
“I loved working with Kristina because she really respected and understood that I come from an artistic background,” explains Jenkins. “There were short sections that I call my motherhood archives. That would be the flashbacks to certain family moments that I edited myself and she incorporated into the film. She concentrated more on the verité, and I concentrated more on the artistic moments. We had a wonderful collaboration.”
As a kid, Adam latched onto a Superman costume. You see his hair in the Clark Kent style and the cape swishing behind him as he runs. Superman has long stood as a pillar of masculinity. He’s incredibly muscular and an indisputable hero, but he’s also a version of masculinity that isn’t rooted in anger. Superman and Clark Kent are characters whose entire ethos is to protect the little guy. To see injustice and squash it. Sometimes by brute, muscular force and other times through investigative journalism. Superman was a vision of masculinity for Adam that made sense when he was younger, but his relationship with the Man of Steel has changed over time.
“I think Superman represented a way of being a very positive man in the world and a very masculine man in the world. I wanted both,” states Sieswerda. “I mean, I was five, so it wasn’t like I was thinking about it that deeply, but I wanted to be a good man, a good boy. I wanted to be taken seriously in my masculinity. Superman is an uber-masculine man. People look at him and it’s clear that he’s a man. I think I was very enthralled with that definition.”
“As I grew, that version of masculinity became more limiting for me,” continues Sieswerda. “At the end of the day, it’s a very traditional, cisgender male version of masculinity. Still, it’s hard not to look at those versions of masculinity and be like, oh yes, manly man, but it’s just not the only way to be. It didn’t leave room for all the different possibilities of masculinity that I felt in myself. It became something easy to hold on to and then it became something I was ready to move past, you know?”
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