Orchids Film Analysis

The movie Orchids is a documentary of a woman named Phoebe Hart who tells her interesting life story about her being intersex. Phoebe and her sister, Bonnie, go on a road trip all throughout Australia, recording each moment on her video camera. The beginning of the documentary is when Phoebe still was unaware about her intersex condition. She recalls memories of her girlfriends growing breasts and talking about menstruating. Phoebe had noticed in her mid-teen years that she was not developing breasts as well as her friends and has yet to get her period. One day she asked her mother as to why she has not started her menstruation yet and her mother told her that she will never be able to menstruate. This upset Phoebe and she was very confused as to why she wasn’t …show more content…
Her mom told her that she was born without a vagina and has male testes inside her. Then, Phoebe and her sister decided to go on this trip throughout Australia to hear about stories of other intersex people and listen to their stories and how they manage to get through everyday life. On this journey, Phoebe ends up telling another secret of the family’s; Bonnie also has the same condition of being an intersex. Growing up, Phoebe never knew that her sister had the same condition as her and even when they found out that each other had it, they never spoke about it to each other. Phoebe and her husband, James, decide that they want to start a family but Phoebe is unable to hold a child so, they decide to go through a long, stressful adoption process, which ends up very rewarding in the end. At the end of the film, you see a revelation within Phoebe because despite that originally her mother did not want to be in the film and thought it was a bad idea to do, she was pleased with the information that she had discovered and also pleased with the other relationships that she