Tourmaline is an experimental portraitist whose subject is Black trans women. This impressionistic piece concerns Mary Jones, who worked at a New York brothel in the early nineteenth century and was described as a “man-monster” in a tabloid-style lithograph that was published after her arrest, in 1836, for robbery.

Anything’s Possible is a delightfully modern Gen Z coming-of-age story that follows Kelsa, a confident high school girl who is trans, as she navigates through senior year. When her classmate Khal gets a crush on her, he musters up the courage to ask her out, despite the drama he knows it could cause. What transpires is a romance that showcases the joy, tenderness, and pain of young love.

A fictional story inspired by a newspaper clipping from the 1830s about a trans woman named Mary Jones who was arrested for stealing a man’s wallet. The film is set in Seneca Village, an autonomous settlement of free Blacks and Irish immigrants located on what is known today as Central Park where Jones, a gifted conjurer who can see visions of future events and alter reality with her well crafted spells, fends off the white city officials who want to take control of the land she and her community call home. Here, Tourmaline answers the call of “critical fabulation” theorized by the influential historian Saidiya Hartman, inventing the narrative that doesn’t exist in the historical archive for Jones.