Local resident Iden Crockett is the subject of a new documentary, "Iden: A Story of Love," filmed by local resident and filmmaker — and Crockett's aunt — Catherine Zimmerman.
‘Iden: A Story of Love’— Documentary tells story of transition, family
- Published: April 3, 2026
When filmmaker Catherine Zimmerman learned that her niece, Iden Crockett, had come out as a transgender woman, the moment marked both a personal and a professional turning point.
“I thought to myself, ‘Well, hell, I don’t know anything about anybody who’s trans,” Zimmerman said in a recent interview with the News, “We don’t know what we don’t know.”
Zimmerman, a longtime documentary filmmaker who moved back to Yellow Springs in 2017 after decades working in broadcast journalism and independent production, decided to learn the way she knew best: by telling a story.
The result is “Iden: A Story of Love,” a feature-length documentary that follows Crockett through the early years of her burgeoning identity as a transgender woman and explores how that process reshaped not only Crockett’s life, but also the lives of those closest to her.
The film will receive its local premiere at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 31, at Little Art Theatre. The screening, sponsored by YS Pride, will include a post-film discussion led by Phillip O’Rourke.
Speaking with the News last month, Crockett said her aunt reached out to her with the idea for the documentary in late 2020, just a few months after she came out.
“So she was right there, right on the ground floor,” Crockett said.
“I just thought, I need to tell this story,” Zimmerman said. “It’s right here. These are people I know.”
Crockett; her wife, Dhyana; and their three children lived only a block away from Zim-merman when filming began, and over the next five years, the filmmaker returned again and again with a camera, filming Crockett’s life as it unfolded. Sometimes that meant capturing major milestones, such as a legal name change, and sometimes it meant recording ordinary scenes of daily family life.
“It was kind of in bursts,” Crockett said. “We’d give her our schedule — the boys have baseball, I’m going to the courthouse, I’ve got a doctor’s appointment — and she would decide what she wanted to film.”
Zimmerman said she tended to approach filming without much structure in mind, arriving to capture whatever moments were happening in the family’s life that day.
“I would just go in the house and start recording stuff — whatever was going on,” she said. “The kids got comfortable with the camera.”
What Zimmerman had initially envisioned as a documentary centered primarily on the process of gender transition gradually expanded as filming progressed. The story that emerged was about Crockett herself, of course, but it also became a story of the way a deeply personal transformation inevitably ripples outward to affect those closest to the center.
“It really ultimately is about all of us,” Crockett said of her and her family, who appear frequently in the finished documentary, reflecting on their own experiences. “The transition is a personal journey, but you drag everyone sort of behind you with it.”
That perspective, Crockett said, was an important part of telling the story honestly; as a parent, she said she feels it’s important for those viewing the documentary to see the ways that parental relationship changed — and, crucially, the many ways it didn’t — as she settled into her identity.
“There’s always this narrative that trans people are dangerous or bad parents,” she said. “I finally had a chance to be like, ‘Here’s an entire movie about me being a great parent.”
While the documentary makes plenty of space for the love and support of those around Crockett, it also captures the uncertainty, doubt, fear and, sometimes, unfair repercussions that come with changing the direction of one’s own life — the kind of thing one only does when there’s no other choice to be made.
“There’s plenty to miss about being a man — this is America,” she says in the film. “Being a man is great. I’m not gonna lie to you, I didn’t want to leave it behind — I had to.”
Before transitioning, Crockett had spent years working as a firefighter and paramedic in Fairborn. That career, she said, was a defining part of her identity and brought with it a community that she considered family. After coming out, she said she lost that family.
“If I had said, ‘Guys, I’m gay, or I’m a drug addict, or I have a gambling problem,’ they would have understood all of that; they didn’t understand this,” she said. “This was almost six years ago, and so much has changed in what people know and understand in six years. For better or worse, no one understood what a trans person was. I didn’t understand what a trans person was until I was standing in the mirror going, ‘Goddamn, are you trans? I don’t even know what that means.’ They knew even less. So I knew it was going to be the end of my career there.”
As that part of Crockett’s life unraveled, however, another began to take shape. During the years Zimmerman was filming, Crockett increasingly began to develop a long-fallow identity as an artist. She’s since embarked on a number of creative ventures, including writing and publishing poetry, drawing and creating collage, hosting multiple art exhibitions in and around the village and writing a monthly column, “My Name is Iden,” for the News.
The documentary itself played a role in encouraging that shift, Crockett said. Early in the filming process, Zimmerman suggested that Crockett record personal video diaries, which would serve as unscripted reflections about what she was experiencing and feeling during the transition.
“She gave me an iPhone and said, ‘Start recording,” Crockett said. “I sat down and talked for like 30 minutes about things I had never shared before.”
At first, the exercise was pragmatic — a way of capturing raw material for the film — but Crockett said it opened her up in a way she hadn’t expected.
“I had made art before, but I never shared it, because I didn’t share anything; pre-transition, I would never have agreed to do this,” Crockett said. “But I thought, ‘This is my chance to do something different,’ because I’d seen YouTube videos about transition, and it was often very clinical or there was a clear agenda behind it, but nothing felt 100% honest and intimate to me…. I’d never thought to share like that before, but after I did it, it felt really good. I watched it back and and I decided to share everything.”
The wider process of capturing the moments that make up the documentary often meant working with limitations for Zimmerman. Unlike larger productions with full crews and established access, “Iden” was largely filmed solo, with Zimmerman juggling equipment — “I used at least four different cameras,” she said — and navigating restrictions that often prevented her from filming in workplaces, government buildings or medical settings.
“The hardest thing about this film was having any cover footage, because nobody would let me shoot anywhere — unless I just went and did it,” Zimmerman said.
In some cases, that meant filming discreetly with smaller, more ubiquitous equipment.
“When we went to shoot her doing her name change, I was just filming with my iPhone,” she said. “I told [Iden], ‘If somebody asks, just say it’s your auntie documenting you getting a name change.’ And nobody asked.”
Zimmerman said her early training in television news helped her learn to make adjustments like that on the fly. She learned her craft shooting on film, she said, and at the time, reporters learned to anticipate what shots they would need in advance.
“A [film] magazine was 100 feet and that equaled 12 minutes — you learn to edit in the camera,” she said. “You do try to hone your anticipation skills. It was a good training ground.”
Even with obstacles, Zimmerman said the central goal of the film remained consistent from beginning to end: helping audiences understand transgender people not as abstractions or political talking points, but as individuals living ordinary lives.
“My whole effort was really to help people understand these are just people,” she said. “If somebody could just see an ordinary person — what they do, what they go through — that was the point.”
That kind of everyday representation, Crockett said, is still relatively rare.
“I’m not a celebrity. I’m not an actress. I’m not any of those things,” she said. “I’m just a person who’s trans, with kids and a job. That story doesn’t get told.”
Still, Crockett acknowledges that the film’s release comes with a mix of anticipation and uncertainty. Greater visibility can bring new opportunities, but it can also create new risks, she said, particularly when the highest offices in the land stand in open opposition to your identity.
“It’s a horribly terrifying time to be a visible trans person; if I say something quotable, there’s a real chance that the actual president of the United States could hate-tweet me,” Crockett said. “I hope that [the film] reaches a lot of people and spawns more opportunities for me to continue speaking out and get out there. At the same time, I’m terrified that all those things will happen…. You run the risk of being very public, but without any celebrity privilege. I don’t have any lawyers or powerful friends or anything like that. I don’t have any money. No one’s gonna put a sheriff’s deputy at the end of my driveway.”
She added: “But I feel like the project is important enough, and it’s an important time to share it.”
Finishing the film meant shaping years of footage into something watchable and coherent, Zimmerman said — not because there was a lack of strong material, but an abundance of it.
“There were things I had to cut out just say, “This is redundant. Someone else because it was too long,” she said. “You have to be really strict with yourself. You already said that.”
And she made one cinematic choice she would not normally make by briefly including her own voice in the film, though she said the decision was practical: It was easier to create a way into conversations for Crockett’s children if she helped lead them in. And ultimately, Zimmerman said, “Iden: A Story of Love” exists because Crockett’s children, wife and Crockett herself were willing to open their lives and allow them to be documented.
“I’m grateful to them for telling the story,” Zimmerman said.
Though the documentary captures a transformative chapter in Crockett’s life, she pointed out that her own “story of love” does not end when the film does.
“This period in time,” she said, “is just a part of my journey.”
Contact: chuck@ysnews.com
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