The film Hélène Trésore Transnationale, directed by Judith Abitbol, arrives in cinemas on Wednesday 1 April. It traces the life of Hélène Hazera, a 74-year-old figure whose career spans militant activism, radio and print journalism. I met her in her Paris apartment where shelves of books, stacks of records and carefully kept clippings outline a life lived in public and in memory. The documentary is introduced in the spring issue of the magazine têtu, and the portrait it offers foregrounds both Hélène’s public interventions and the quieter rituals that sustained her work.
Raised by parents who were résistants during the Second World War, Hélène grew up under a family legacy she felt both honored and unable to match. Her schooling at Janson-de-Sailly and early immersion in her father’s library — texts by Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine and the situationists — shaped her literary and political sensibilities. At home, tensions over gender presentation were acute: an imposing masculine presence from her father and a mother who resisted early signs of her daughter’s femininity. These domestic pressures fed into the choices Hélène would later make, both on the streets and in the newsroom.
From rebellion to collective experiment
As a young person she sought liberation among peers in radical circles: the FHAR — the Homosexual Front of Revolutionary Action — and then the small, iconoclastic group called the Gazolines, formed in 1972. That group, numbering only about fifteen people with several who later transitioned, rejected doctrinaire thinking and used humor and provocation to unsettle political orthodoxies. Hélène helped coin blistering slogans that mocked conventional leftist rhetoric while carving space for gender dissidence. Those early public performances and theatrical stunts were part of a wider strategy: to make visible what mainstream politics ignored, and to challenge both sexual and political norms through ridicule and camaraderie rather than quiet argument alone.
Becoming a public voice and a journalist
Hélène completed her transition in 1973 and became one of the first openly transgender people to work in a major national paper when she joined Libération, introduced by Michel Cressole. There she wrote playful, irreverent pieces about television and culture, aiming to spark conversation among readers who might not have watched the programs herself. She also produced some of the earliest journalism on trans identity and on the legal questions surrounding change of civil status, a reform championed in 1982 by senator Henri Caillavet. Later, Hélène hosted a show on France Culture devoted to popular song, and her mother’s pride became tangible: she would listen to the radio for hours and collect each published article, saving them as evidence of a daughter transformed both publicly and professionally.
Activism during the health crisis and beyond
The arrival of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s tested existing communities and forced cross-ideological solidarities. As friends and comrades fell ill, rituals of mourning at Père-Lachaise multiplied and Hélène joined Act Up-Paris, taking the megaphone to denounce weak prevention policies and to demand rights for trans people and sex workers. Her personal history included a period of street sex work, a fact she never disavowed; instead she combined that experience with her journalistic practice to defend those most at risk. In June 1999 she published a long piece in têtu, “Les sœurs du boulevard Ney,” about Algerian trans sex workers — an article she later named among the proudest in her career.
Filming a life in motion
For director Judith Abitbol the central challenge was to capture Hélène’s continuous, conversational energy rather than to assemble a tidy chronology. The film accepts moments of loose framing and off-kilter shots because Hélène’s presence is a flow: she speaks, remembers and pivots without rehearsed transitions. Abitbol chose a mode that privileges availability and mood over polished form, sometimes invoking the cinema vérité patience of a filmmaker like Frédéric Wiseman — set the camera and let the subject unspool. That aesthetic risk mirrors Hélène’s own refusal of airtight categories, privileging a portrait that feels lived-in, noisy and alive rather than edited into neat compartments.
Legacy, music and continuing resonance
Hélène’s life crosses journalism, activism and a deep love for popular song, Andalusian music and silent cinema; these cultural passions thread through the documentary and her radio programs. As the first openly transgender woman to establish herself in major national media, she helped create language and visibility for issues that are now central to public debate. The film places her political interventions side by side with the small domestic traces — a mother’s clippings, a living room of records — to show how private memory and public action sustain one another. Credit for the production images goes to Judith Abidbol / Godot Production, and the film invites audiences to measure how a single life can ripple through decades of struggle, creativity and care.