‘Re-Entry’ Filmmaker Ariel Mahler On The Importance Of Trans Visibility And Vulnerability In AFI-Backed Short Film

It’s OK to let go of the past, but to heal fully, it’s important to remember the lessons that your experience taught you. No theme rings more true than in Ariel Mahler’s short film Re-Entry, a masterclass character study that artfully weaves the tender and cerebral in a tale of reconciliation with past regrets and the overwhelming power of self-love. The story follows a transgender NASA scientist, Maya (Danielle Squyres), who rediscovers a lost satellite she launched 35 years earlier. Though excited by the potential recovery of the satellite, Maya finds herself still haunted by the memory of her painful, closeted past (younger Maya, played by Tirosh Schneider) and what she perceives to be the humiliating end of her career. Maya must decide whether to inform NASA about recovering the satellite or to let the weight of the past send her spiraling through orbit. 

The 15-minute short was an official selection of Out on Film – Atlanta in 2024 and the recipient of the Best LGBTQ+ short award at the Savannah Film Festival. 

Below, Mahler opens up to Deadline about the vulnerabilities to crafting cinematic trans narratives, inspirations and the importance of self-reflection.

DEADLINE: Where did the idea of Re-Entry come from? 

ARIEL MAHLER: It started with science because my cinematographer, who I’m really close with, who is also trans, Maryn McGaw, actually sent me a TikTok video about this phenomenon known as a zombie satellite. This is a scientific phenomenon: a satellite launched many decades ago sometimes malfunctions, stops communicating, and then floats aimlessly in outer space. Then, what’ll happen even more decades later, the satellite will reemerge and essentially come back to life and start communicating again, hence the zombie satellite name. So, when I was looking at this video, it had a real emotional impact on me because it was a language that resonated with me as a trans person. The TikToker was talking about these satellites floating, lost in the wrong orbit, searching for the ability to communicate after they’ve lost it, and then something happens where they’re able to reemerge and begin communicating again. They find their orbit and their orientation. And, I was just like, “Yep, that tracks. I’ve had all of those experiences in my own personal life.” 

So, when I saw this video, I imagined that it would be like creating a character who lives as a metaphor for the satellite. This trans woman, who has for a long time felt like she’s lost in the wrong orbit, is floating, searching for her community, when something inspires her to re-engage and re-enter her own life, essentially. Re-Entry is a story about reconciling with your past and making terms with who you once were, as it impacts who you are now. And I think that everybody probably can relate to the experience of thinking about your past and thinking about choices you made or things you did or things you didn’t do that impact who you are today, and that you maybe regret or you have complicated feelings about. And for queer and trans people, we tend to have a very complicated relationship with our past. So, I wanted to use this metaphor as a vehicle to explore our relationship with the past and how we integrate it. 

DEADLINE: What were some cinematic influences for your short? 

MAHLER: One of my favorite genres is emotional sci-fi films. Some of the biggest reference points for me are Arrival, Contact and Interstellar. They are all films that use science as a vehicle to tell a deep, emotional story about whatever situation the character is facing. So, me and my cinematographer watched those. 

DEADLINE: I’m fascinated by the way you tell the story. You have two different actors playing the same character: one, the younger male presenting version of Maya, and the other, the older version of Maya. Talk a bit more about this concept of both of them being in communication with each other onscreen. 

MAHLER: It wasn’t always that way. In the creative writing process, I struggled with [how to convey inner turmoil]. I knew the story’s foundation was an older trans woman who rediscovers a satellite she helped launch and is now forced to decide, “Do I return to NASA as my new self?” So, I knew that there had to be another person involved in that because I didn’t want her to just be alone wandering around having this monologue. So, I really struggled with who is the best person to bring into this world and to interrupt the status quo of how she lives her life. There was a version where her coworker, George (Robert Dowdy/Leon A. Walker), came in much earlier, and it was actually him who showed up and said, “Hey, we found the satellite.” And then she had to deal with, “Do I out myself to him? How does this go?” There was a version where it was a young NASA intern who came over to try to get her to come back to NASA. There were all these different versions of it. 

And then I was thinking about, I want this to be the most coherent and specific conflict possible. So, who is Maya actually struggling with? Who is she most at odds with? And I realized, oh, it’s herself. And then I also realized, oh, this is a film, so I can sort of bend reality a little. Not too much, but realistic enough to tell this story. So, the idea of bringing her former self back evolved through that very slow process. It was something I was a little nervous about at first because I think a lot of trans people tend to have complicated relationships with our past, as I said earlier. One of those complexities is that it can be hard to reckon with former versions of ourselves. Trans people sometimes even use the phrase dead name to refer to their former self as if their previous self is literally dead. I’ve always struggled with that because on one hand, I understand that. Looking at old photos of myself, I found it challenging and struggled to a certain extent. 

But on the other hand, I actually have a lot of love and compassion for my younger self, because I think about it as, “They were just trying to do the best they could in a world that was telling them they had to be a very specific type of person.” I remember that the idea of putting the characters face-to-face felt scary, but it was also another reason why I was like, that means it’s the right thing to do, because if I’m afraid of it, I’m a bit like, this is risky, then that feels like exactly the right place to go. 

DEADLINE: How much of this short film is you? 

MAHLER: I’ll answer this first by going back to the film at hand. When I decided to bring the younger Maya into the world, I struggled. I was really trying to figure out who was going to go back to NASA and who was anti-going back to NASA. Originally, it was flipped from the film version. Older Maya was the one who was like, “I found the data, I want to go back,” and younger Maya was like, “No, you can’t. You can’t let them see you like this.” Then that was the push-and-pull dynamic, but it flipped. The reason that this feels relevant to your question, I think, is part of the challenge and also catharsis of making this movie is that it was a messy process. It’s messy to think about my past. On one hand, I want to grab the former me and shake them by the shoulders and be like, “What are you doing? Stop lying to everybody. Stop lying to yourself. Take control of your destiny. It’s not worth spending all of this time being miserable.” 

There’s also some anger that I feel towards my younger self and love, shame, empathy and just the whole rainbow of human emotions. When a film is so deeply personal, it can be really challenging to drill down into the core thing [you’re trying to communicate]. Because it’s a short film, I only have 15 minutes to say one very specific thing, and there’s so much that I could say on this topic. Trying to nail down one specific thing made it really challenging but energizing. 

The other piece that feels relevant to your question is my journey as a filmmaker. This is obviously a very trans story with a trans narrative, but, as a storyteller, it’s also important to me to tell stories that are not “just trans.” I never want it to be where the only conflict is coming out, or the only conflict is trans identity. So, for this short film, putting Maya in the realm of this scientific world was meaningful to me because she’s not just trans, she’s a scientist. She’s a NASA astronomer. She has a whole career that she’s been working her entire life for.

In the same way that I’m not just trans, I’m a filmmaker and an artist, and I have a career I’m building. So those two things feel deeply connected. But when I think about past me, I’m thinking about it in relation to my gender. I’m also thinking about the regrets I have. I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker when I was four years old, stealing my dad’s camcorder and making dumb little movies with my friends, yet I was afraid to embrace it fully. I was like, “Well, that’s not practical,” throughout high school and college. I opted to be more traditional. Then it wasn’t until I was almost 30 that I really embraced filmmaking. So, I look at former me and think about where my career would probably be now, if I had started back in high school or whatever. 

DEADLINE: How did you find your two leads in younger and older Maya?

MAHLER: It was a very interesting challenge that I set up for myself, because I knew that I, one, had to cast a trans woman as a lead, and two, someone who was at least 50 years old, plus, because authentic casting is really important to me. But, unfortunately, there just aren’t a lot of visible older trans women actresses. And this isn’t because they aren’t out there, but because they just haven’t really been given the opportunity to get work or be seen. So, thankfully, Danielle Squyres was part of an acting group in LA called ActNOW, which is a program for queer and trans people. I have some friends who are also involved in that, and one of them, my friend Sasha Forests, knew Danielle and connected us. So, I brought her in for the audition process, and I knew she was the one. She has a really beautiful subtlety and was also really able to capture that external shell. But then, inside, you can sense the vulnerability and rawness. 

For younger Maya, that was a new challenge, because I cast Danielle first, so I needed to find someone who vaguely resembled her. It was still about authenticity casting; I wanted somebody who had at least some personal understanding of queer and trans identity. So, I didn’t just want to necessarily cast a straight cisgender man who has no personal experience with that, but at the same time, I didn’t fully want to cast a trans woman and ask her to completely detransition herself for this student film. So, I was like, “How do I balance this?” Thankfully, I met Tirosh [Schneider] through a mutual friend, and they identify as non-binary and gender queer. They were comfortable presenting as a male at the time but are very much in the queer world and know what the experience of feeling othered by your gender is like, so that felt important. 

Also, I do think, from a spiritual perspective, once you begin the journey of making a film, there’s a call in the universe, or God, or whoever you pull your power from, that magic conspires to put all the pieces into place. And the fact that I met Danielle, Tirosh and Robert, who plays George, all these people came into my life at the exact moment when I needed to find them. It was a beautiful experience. 

DEADLINE: You’ve shown this film on the festival circuit. What has the reception been like so far? 

MAHLER: We’ve been lucky and have had great feedback. We’ve been going to festivals for a year and a half now, which is awesome and exciting. The most meaningful thing to me is when specifically trans people come up to me and feel really seen by this story, because I do think that anytime you’re putting something out that is vulnerable, there’s a bit of fear. I didn’t know how trans people were going to respond to this younger self idea of putting a physical form of this woman’s younger [male-presenting] self. And a lot of the trans people that I’ve spoken to feel really seen and emotionally resonant with that story, so that means a lot. We’ve also been able to screen it for some students and young people, and having younger trans folks come up to me and say they were touched by and appreciate this story is meaningful to me because I never had that when I was young. 

DEADLINE: What would you like people to take away from this short? 

MAHLER: For me, I’ve learned that I would often go back in order to move forward. We have to look backwards and engage with our past. Engaging with the past can be scary, uncomfortable and vulnerable, but that’s exactly why we have to face that hard truth. It’s only through actively engaging with our past and making terms with our journey that we’re able to move forward. 

[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]