In August 2025, Block Cinema’s groundbreaking Trans Portraiture series traveled beyond Evanston to Philadelphia, where Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Academic Curator for Cinema and Media Arts, presented highlights of the program at the 31st annual Visible Evidence Conference.

Visible Evidence, the premier international gathering of scholars and practitioners of documentary and nonfiction media, convened this year at Temple University under the theme of “Community.” For over three decades, the conference has been a touchstone for practitioners engaged in research and debates on historical and contemporary documentary practice and nonfiction media culture. Each edition brings together scholars, filmmakers, and archivists from across disciplines—film studies, anthropology, history, queer studies, and more—to share new research, debate critical issues, and screen both historical and contemporary works of nonfiction.

The 2025 conference in Philadelphia underscored the city’s long tradition of community-based and independent documentary practices. With programming that followed immediately on the heels of the BlackStar Film Festival, Visible Evidence XXXI highlighted questions of community media, global documentary practices, and archival recovery, providing a dynamic platform for work like Block Cinema’s Trans Portraiture.

Bringing Trans Portraiture to an international stage

At the conference, Metzger curated a screening of three rarely seen short films from the 1970s and 1980s—Communication from Weber (1988), I Am Not This Body (1971), and Nancy, Henri, and Elizabeth (1973)—all recently rediscovered and digitally preserved through Block Cinema’s archival work. These films formed the centerpiece of Trans Portraiture, a March 2025 series at the museum that paired historic works with contemporary films by trans filmmakers to spark intergenerational conversations about gender, identity, and representation.

Among them, Nancy, Henri, and Elizabeth holds special significance. Directed by Bob Aibel and Lynn Fagan while students at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communications, the 17-minute film brings together the voices of two trans women at different stages of transition alongside that of a bisexual man whose performance of gender reflects the fluidity of desire and identity. For the Visible Evidence screening, Metzger presented the long-unavailable short in a new 4K restoration produced by USC’s Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive in partnership with Block Cinema, rendering the film more vivid than ever before.

One highlight of the event was the presence of one of the film’s subjects, celebrated jeweler and impresario Henri David, who saw the film for the first time in 50 years as well as Bob Aibel, the film’s co-director.

Film strip images of Nancy, Henri, and Elizabeth taken by the Block Cinema team during preservation.

Extending conversations on preservation and community

The screening sparked conversations among scholars and practitioners engaged in feminist and queer film recovery work. Metzger’s presentation highlighted how archival preservation intersects with contemporary scholarship, ensuring that these urgent stories remain visible and accessible.

“After viewing Nancy, Henri, and Elizabeth for the first time in 50 years, what struck Henri David the most was that he felt the exact same way about everything he expressed in the 1974 film,” said Metzger. “As much as these films are time capsules from a different era, they are also living histories that resonate powerfully with the struggle for rights, recognition, and acceptance today. For many viewers of the Trans Portraiture series, the fact that these films are 30, 40, even 50 years old—that’s less important than the opportunity to build a stronger community by coming together to watch and discuss them now. By screening these films in a forum like Visible Evidence, we hope to expand the community we’re building with our programs and to connect our archival efforts at The Block with global conversations about documentary practice and preservation.”

Block Cinema’s investment in media preservation—including the recent addition of in-house scanning equipment—opens the door for further rediscovery of overlooked histories on film. By bringing Trans Portraiture into dialogue with the international Visible Evidence community, The Block advances its mission to uncover, preserve, and amplify stories too often left at the margins.