“Adam’s Apple,” a documentary by Peterborough mother-son filmmaking duo Amy Jenkins and Adam Sieswerda, will have its New England premiere at the Boston Indepependent Film Festival on Monday, April 27 at 5 p.m. at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square.
Tickets and information are available at https://iffboston.org/events/adamsapple/.
Jenkins and Sieswerda have been traveling non-stop since “Adam’s Apple” premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin last month. Since then they attended film festivals in Switzerland, Ohio, Denmark, Michigan, and Milwaukee before returning to New England.
Sieswerda, who graduated from Columbia University with a degree in film studies in 2025, said attending the SXSW film festival in Austin was “really hectic.”
“It was like, wow — this is cool! But it’s so big. There are all these famous actors and directors, and then there’s us, with our crew of four people,” he said.
“Adam’s Apple” was selected by “Letterbox” as one of just two documentaries in the top 10 films of SXSW. Roger Ebert wrote that “Adam’s Apple” was “the best documentary I have seen at this year’s SXSW,” and the film was awarded best LGBT film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in March.
“The rest were big Hollywood names, and they had multi-million dollar budgets and executive producers,” Jenkins said. “But we have gotten some great press and we’re really grateful. We have gotten a lot of ‘best of’ picks, and we’re getting some attention.”
Jenkins, who is originally from Springfield, IL, first came to Peterborough as a MacDowell Fellow in 1998. She met her husband, John Sieswerda, at MacDowell, and the couple raised their two children, Adam and Elias, in Peterborough.
Jenkins’ first feature length film, “Instructions on Parting,” tells the story of the deaths of her mother, her brother, and her sister from different types of cancer in the span of a few years. The film won “Best Feature Documentary” in the Athens, Ohio Film Festival, and in 2018, Jenkins won “Filmmaker of the Year” from the New Hampshire Film Festival.
Jenkins has been documenting her life since her grandfather gave her a camera when she was 8.
Sieswerda, who was assigned female at birth, says he started to think about making a film about his experiences as a trans teenager while he was away at Columbia.
“In my junior and senior year I started to seriously think about making a trans coming-of- age story, because I had not seen something like that when I was a young teenager myself, and I wanted to help contribute to that narrative,” Sieswerda said.
Once they decided to make a documentary about Sieswerda’s journey, Sieswerda and Jenkins began going through hours of home movies, and eventually started working with producer Brit Fryer and film editor Kristina Motwani. Sieswerda began to write drafts of his voice-over, which narrates the film.
“We had joked about making something together. We did not have a clear vision of what it was going to be until we started going through the footage, and then the narrative started coming together,” Jenkins said. “This story is really rooted in joy and in unconditional love.”
The film covers Sieswerda’s teen milestones, including the prom, graduation, and “high school drama and not-drama” from his freshman year in high school through his freshman year in college.
“In the film, we wanted to center on joy– the joy that I had growing up. I was able to have to have a lot of joy growing up in this community. I did not have to fight hard to express myself against the local community as many people have to. People were very kind and relatively quick in understanding, and that meant a lot to me obviously, growing up,” Sieswerda said.
Sieswerda says there are few depictions of trans children and teens in film living “regular lives.”
“There are a lot of queer or trans stories that center on trauma. That is a very important aspect to talk about because it can be — especially now — a very difficult life to be trans. Having a political existence is a struggle,” Sieswerda said.
“Adam’s Apple” is filmed mostly in and around the family’s home in Peterborough, the roads where Adam rode his bike or walked as a child, and on the surrounding land. Some scenes, including Sieswerda’s senior prom and graduation, were filmed at Dublin School.
“The town, the region, come through in the film. It’s not just about our family. It’s clear there is a tight-knight community I grew up in, with people who were very supportive of me,” he said. “You can see it in the scenes not just with my family but with my friends, who are the first people I told, who grew up with me and always knew my identity.”
Sieswerda said that nature is a recurring theme in the film, and particularly, the view of Mount Monadnock from the land surrounding their home.
“It’s such an iconic image of this area. We would always go for walks as a family and look at Monadnock,” Sieswerda said. “There are a lot of time-lapse shots which show time passing throughout high school; they show the seasons changing.”
Sieswerda said that in retrospect, he realized that the use of the images of nature “show that my progression through male puberty is as natural as the seasons progressing through time.”
“The film shows that my growing up as a trans person is a part of nature. We see Monadnock changing in the fall, and we see scenes of my transition. To show my transition as natural and as ‘normal’ as anything else — for lack of a better word — is important, because it takes away the sensationalism of teens transitioning medically. It’s like, ‘No, this is not something that is dramatic or sensational.’ It is something that should just be normal. it should be something that teens should be allowed to do, just as any teen should be allowed to grow and express themselves.”
Both Sieswerda and Jenkins say the film is not overtly political, and is primarily a coming-of-age story.
“We wanted to show that everyone goes through these rhythms of growing up. It’s not like I am so different from everyone else. We did not want to be explicitly political. We were not trying to create more division,” Sieswerda said.
“We don’t get into politics at all,” Jenkins said. “There is really not a single political scene, except when Adam filmed me at a rally. The existence of the film in itself is political, but there are no politics in the film. What you are observing really is our experience.”
Jenkins says his transition is just one part of the film, which centers on his whole high school experience and typical teen milestones.
“We are whole people. We have much more to our lives than just transition,” Sieswerda said. “In the film, we wanted to de-center the medical transition, and we wanted to show that, for trans teens, this is just a commonplace thing. We should be able to go through puberty and grow up alongside the other teens around us.”
Sieswerda and Jenkins feel it is important to note about the changes to New Hampshire laws affecting trans people since Sieswerda transitioned.
“It’s now illegal to have the surgery I had. It’s illegal to have top surgery under 18. They have banned gender affirming healthcare. That wasn’t the case when I was a teen,” Sieswerda said.
Jenkins said the laws in New Hampshire will significantly impact teens who hope to transition before puberty.
“The thing that is the most disappointing about teens losing access to gender affirming care is that many of these milestones that we show in the film will be difficult or impossible for teens who can’t transition until they are 19,” Jenkins said. “I have deep, deep sorrow and concern for young trans people right now and what they have to do to survive.”
Sieswerda said the reaction to the film so far has been gratifying.
“So far, I think we have succeeded on showing that joy we wanted to show… So far, everyone who has seen the movie has seen that, and we would not have had that joy without this community,” he said. “Growing up here, I was much luckier than most people.”