Before I Change My Mind

Now available digitally in Canada and the USA.

Feature Film – 89 minutes

World Premiere: Locarno Film Festival

U.S. Theatrical Premiere: Vidiots, Los Angeles

1987: While the other students wonder if new kid Robin is a boy or a girl, Robin forges a complicated bond with the school bully and starts to make increasingly dangerous choices to fit in.

Director: Trevor Anderson

Screenwriters: Trevor Anderson & Fish Griwkowsky

Producers: Katrina Beatty, Alyson Richards

Executive Producers: Trevor Anderson, Justin Lachance, Patrick Ewald, Nick Adams

Starring: Vaughan Murrae, Dominic Lippa, Lacey Oake, Matthew Rankin, Shannon Blanchet

Produced with the support of Telefilm Canada, the Alberta Media Fund, Epic Pictures

Production Companies: Loud Whisper Productions, Outside Line Studio

Press

Awards

  • Boccalino d’Oro Award for Best Acting Performance: Vaughan Murrae as Robin – 2022 – Locarno Film Festival – Locarno, Switzerland

  • Best Performance in a Female Role in a Feature Film: Lacey Oake as Izzy – 2022 – Iris Prize LGBTQ+ Film Festival – Cardiff, Wales

  • Grand Prix, Mention Spéciale du Jury – 2022 – Festival du nouveau cinéma (FNC) – Montréal, Québec

  • Student Choice Award – 2022 – Philadelphia Film Festival – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  • Best Scripted Feature, Best Screenwriter, Best Cinematographer – 2022 – Alberta Film and Television Awards

  • Audience Award for Best Feature Film – 2022 – Rainbow Visions Film Festival – Edmonton, Alberta

  • Best Musical Universe – 2023 – Canadian Film Festival Dieppe, Youth Jury – Dieppe, France

  • At Sundance 2020, the script of Before I Change My Mind was named to The GLAAD List: a curated list of the ten most promising LGBTQ+inclusive screenplays in Hollywood

Screenings

“This hilarious and nail-biting rollercoaster ride through teen angst, crushes and friendships breathes new life into the well-trodden genre of 1980s high-school comedy-drama. Robin, an androgynous newcomer at school, refuses to join the binary world of single-sex sports teams. Overturning expectations that the story will venture down the rocky road of bullying over their gender identity, Robin starts hanging out as one of the boys, developing a crush on Carter, the meanest tearaway. There is little wrangling over who might be gay or trans, and as the characters’ moral compasses evolve, the film widens its perspective, grappling with our flaws and what drives us to rebel. Director Trevor Anderson almost steals the show in the role of an ultra-flamboyant local community theatre maestro, who ropes the teens into appearing in ‘Mary Magdalene: Video Star’, a synth-pop musical pastiche of Jesus Christ Superstar that will have you rolling in the aisles.”
— Zorian Clayton, British Film Institute
“For Trevor Anderson, childhood is a period full of constant turmoil. The story of Robin, the queer star of his first feature Before I Change My Mind, played by non-binary teenage actor Vaughan Murrae, is inspired by the director’s personal experience. At first glance the film seems to pursue the agenda of so much social cinema, but in reality it tries in different ways to tell adolescence as it really is, with all its ambiguous, unconscious and profound complexity.”
— Alice nella Città, independent section of the Rome Film Festival