Ada Nacikligi

I saw this excellent film at Outfest. You can’t take your eyes off Carlie Guevara who is flat-out fabulous. Her performance was subtle and even sublime in expressing the fears, pains but also the lives and hopes of trans women living in America. The immigrant grandmother's unspoken understanding and unalterable love, while facing her own loneliness and economic struggles in the big city, was exemplary and the scapegoating and violent effects of hegemonic masculinity was well portrayed by all actors. The Garden Left Behind is a dazzlingly potent, authentic, and complex movie... a film that forcesyou to ask questions that have no easy answers.