The night Chelsea Manning was released from Fort Leavenworth military prison in Kansas, her first steps as a free woman were being filmed. It was May 2017 and she had just served nearly seven years of a 35-year sentence for disclosing 750,000 classified documents to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks. “It was nerve-racking,” says the man who filmed her, the British artist and documentary-maker Tim Travers Hawkins, from his apartment in New York. “I knew it was the money shot, if you like. It was such an important historical moment.”
Hawkins kept his camera rolling, assembling XY Chelsea (the title is Manning’s social media handle) from more than 250 hours of footage. He was there when Manning’s legal team jetted her out of Fort Leavenworth on a private plane to a safe house, a cabin in the woods, to readjust to life outside prison. He filmed her “hello world” first steps into public life after being invisible for seven years: a New York Times interview and a Vogue photoshoot with Annie Leibovitz. He was there when Manning made a bid to run for the Senate less than eight months after release. But it is the unguarded, private moments in the film that strike home, as she finds her identity, becoming Chelsea Manning.
At the time of her arrest in 2010, Manning presented as male: Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old US army intelligence analyst and tech geek responsible for the biggest leak of secret material in history. In the army photograph, Bradley looks like a kid dressing up in a soldier’s uniform. Manning came out as trans the day after her sentencing – her lawyers advised against it, arguing it would complicate her case, but she had had enough of secrecy. In prison, she successfully sued the government for access to hormone treatment, but was held in all-male facilities and forced to have her hair cut into a short “conservative” man’s style. Manning said guards would walk in on her changing her shirt or putting on her bra.
The happiest Manning ever looks in XY Chelsea is at the safe house as her young lawyer, Chase Strangio, styles her hair for her social media profile picture. Afterwards, Manning giggles, wondering if there’s too much “boobage” in the shot. “You could see how exhilarated she was just being able to use a mirror,” Hawkins says. “They didn’t have mirrors in the prison, just beaten metal sheets.”
In October last year, Manning underwent gender confirmation surgery. An early edit of the film included footage of her convalescing but, after speaking with the trans community, Hawkins decided it wasn’t appropriate to include it. “One thing I really wanted to avoid with the trans narrative was this kind of idea that transition represented a ‘before’ and ‘after’. The idea that she only became a woman because she had surgery, or that she wasn’t a woman before.”
Manning grew up in a small town in Oklahoma. Her childhood was unstable emotionally – both her parents drank heavily and split up when she was 12. She had a complicated relationship with her father and, tellingly, the film doesn’t give us a Manning family reunion, although Hawkins interviews her Welsh mum, who speaks with difficulty after a stroke. In the film, while testing lipsticks, Manning explains that she enlisted in the army on a whim at 19 – running away from gender dysphoria: “I was trying to man up … I saw it like going cold turkey, but you can’t stop being who you are.” She stops, looks in the mirror. “This is a fantastic shade.”
When Hawkins conceived the film, Manning was not meant to be in it. An artist-activist, Hawkins was making an experimental digital art piece about prisoners who were unfilmable due to the restrictions of their captivity. He sent Manning a letter in prison, and she agreed to take part, sending him her prison diaries.
During her sentence, Manning was repeatedly held in solitary confinement and subjected to conditions described by the UN’s torture envoy as “cruel, inhuman and degrading”. In 2016, feeling depressed and hopeless, she twice attempted suicide. By this point she had given up on a miracle and expected to serve out every one of the 35 years of her sentence. Then, in a surprise move, President Barack Obama commuted it. “The feeling among everyone was that this was something that would never happen,” says Hawkins.
While Manning was still in prison, one of her close friends kept a sign above her desk, a reminder for their telephone calls: “Don’t rush Chelsea. Remember she’s weak.” Did Hawkins worry that filming would heap pressure on someone already in a fragile mental state? “Absolutely. One thing we were really clear on as a production team was that Chelsea had been let down throughout her life. The last thing we wanted was to be the latest people to let her down. We were extremely aware not to push it and to give her space.”
He adds: “I felt my role in this film was not to try and do a Wikipedia page of everything that has happened in this case. I wanted to try to find an emotional connection and an emotional truth. A lot of times that meant just being gentle and just being there and present and allowing things to unfold.”
That softly-softly approach will disappoint anyone expecting the film to be a tell-all. What does Manning think about WikiLeaks publishing stolen Democratic campaign emails in 2016, boosting Donald Trump’s election chances? (As president, Trump has banned transsexuals from the military.) The Mueller report? Or the rape allegations against Assange in Sweden? We are left none the wiser. Manning has never spoken publicly about Assange, and she keeps schtum in XY Chelsea. She is writing a memoir, due out late next year, which may reveal more.
“People will be frustrated, I think, watching the film because there are all sorts of burning questions about her relationship [with Assange] that people want answered,” Hawkins admits. By way of explanation, he restates one of Manning’s justifications for her continued silence – that the two never met in person. “Their communication was pretty limited and based on anonymous chat,” says Hawkins. “Assange was not this big figure when she was in communication with him. He was pretty much an unknown. He was this kooky guy who was known in the tech circles.”
Besides, Hawkins says he wanted to wrestle the narrative from WikiLeaks and re-centre it on Manning. He makes the point that, by the time she contacted the site, Manning had already decided to turn whistleblower. “I think the way that Chelsea approached the disclosures was incredibly intuitive, rather than calculated in perhaps the way that [Edward] Snowden approached his disclosures. I feel it was almost a more kind of punk rock act of direct action. She’s like that. She is a kind of punk rock figure for me.”
• XY Chelsea is out on Friday.
