Every festival has a film the room remembers. At Saturday’s New York Transgender Film Festival, held at the Cherry Grove Theater as the anchor event of the Trans Celebration Weekend, that film was “Call Me Micky,” and the reaction inside the theater left no doubt about it. By the time the credits rolled, the audience was on its feet, and it stayed that way.
The documentary short follows Micky Angelo Petrillo, a larger-than-life New Jersey native who transitioned at fifty-nine and has spent the years since refusing to slow down, whether that means chasing new stages, new friendships, or simply a new, fuller version of himself. Now in his sixties, Petrillo is, by his own account and by the film’s joyful evidence, making up for lost time, and he is doing it loudly, warmly, and without a shred of apology.
“Call Me Micky” is produced by the New York City creative company CARDINAL and directed by Andrew Rasmussen, with Petrillo himself serving as a producer on his own story alongside Stacey O’Reilly. Executive producer Dominique Jackson, known to millions for her portrayal of Elektra on FX’s “Pose” and for her tireless advocacy for transgender visibility, also appears on camera opposite Petrillo, and their conversation about identity, visibility, and what it finally feels like to live openly as yourself gave the film its emotional backbone. Petrillo has also written about that journey in his memoir, “Walking the Earth: First as a Woman, Then a Man,” and the film plays like a natural extension of that same unguarded honesty.
What made Saturday’s screening extraordinary wasn’t just the film, it was watching it land in real time inside a room built for exactly this kind of story. Laughter came easily and often, the kind that comes from recognizing yourself, or someone you love, in a story told with real affection rather than pity. When the tone shifted toward the film’s more tender moments, the theater shifted with it, and by the closing scenes the applause had built into something closer to a roar, an audience of trans and non-binary filmmakers, performers, and their allies rising together for one of their own.
It was, in the end, the kind of reception a filmmaker dreams about and rarely gets: total, unguarded, room-shaking enthusiasm. And it belonged as much to Petrillo as it did to the film itself. In a festival built on the premise that trans stories deserve to be told by trans people, on trans people’s own terms, “Call Me Micky” didn’t just fit that mission, it became the afternoon’s proof of concept, a joyful, full-throated reminder of why Cherry Grove has spent more than a century being exactly the kind of place where a story like this one gets to be celebrated instead of merely tolerated.
Watch the official trailer for “Call Me Micky” on Youtube here:
The official website for “Call Me Micky” may be found at https://www.callmemickyfilm.com