Lebanese photographer, filmmaker, and Cold Cuts magazine creative director Mohamad Abdouni has released a new documentary titled "Treat Me Like Your Mother," which documents the lives of trans women in Lebanon. The film, drawn from an Arabic expression asking for mercy, reframes motherhood as an ethical position rooted in responsibility for the trans community. Rather than extracting trauma, Abdouni allows the women to tell their own histories in personal, nonlinear, and surprising forms. The documentary evolved from a book project featuring oral histories of ten women, and the film centers Abdouni's own reflections on what these women represented to him growing up. In a dialogue with photographer Michael Bailey-Gates for CULTURED, Abdouni discusses the importance of letting trans women define the terms of their own visibility.
The article matters because it highlights a shift in documentary practice away from sensationalizing trauma toward celebrating queer lives on their own terms. Abdouni's approach—prioritizing gentleness, intimacy, and celebration as resistance—offers a model for ethical storytelling that challenges mainstream media's tendency to extract painful narratives from marginalized communities. The film also underscores the urgency of recording queer history from those who lived it, especially in contexts like Lebanon where such histories are often undocumented. This conversation reflects broader conversations in contemporary art about representation, agency, and the role of artists in shaping how marginalized communities are seen.