the story

In San Francisco, California, TATI—a shy, self-conscious 19-year-old black trans girl—restocks the shelves at a high-end boutique, where she caters to the city’s hipsters, tourists, and limousine liberals. In burst ANGEL and GEMINI—two unapologetically boisterous and dynamic young trans women who Tati can’t take her eyes off of. When Tati realizes she knows Angel from back in the day, the two exchange numbers, eager to rekindle their friendship.

That is until Tati arrives at work the next day to find out she’s been fired. Turns out, Angel and Gemini shoplifted some high-priced items from the store, and now Tati is to blame. Desperate to keep her job, and too ashamed to tell her boss that she’s been living in a car with her mom, Tati decides to track Angel and Gemini down and return the merchandise they stole.

But a last ditch effort to reclaim the stolen goods becomes Tati’s introduction into the seductive world of petty theft. Now without a job and with little left to lose, Tati decides to team up with Angel and Gemini. Together, they stage a daring robbery of one of the city’s most exclusive luxury brand stores, with Tati as their ringleader.

Director’s statement

From the first time I heard of the Rainbow Girls, I was fascinated. Known for their bright colored hair and brazen tactics, “Rainbow Girls” was the moniker given to a loose band of black trans and cisgender women in their late teens and early twenties, who launched a string of robberies of San Francisco’s most exclusive luxury brand stores in 2013. 

I was living in the Bay Area at the time, when the influx of wealth from the tech industry spurred unprecedented levels of gentrification and displacement of longtime residents. Around that same time, a friend working in retail told me how employees were being trained to deal with these groups of young women swarming high-end stores like Gucci, Prada, and Burberry, then snatching as many items off the shelves as they could get their hands on before bolting.

As a lover of heist films like Set it Off, I imagined a story that centers around the friendship between three charismatic young trans women, pushed to society’s margins, who unapologetically push back by looting luxury items associated with the type of wealth, privilege, and prestige that they are too often denied. 

This film will not only serve as my graduate school thesis project, it will also serve as a proof-of-concept for what will become my very first the feature-length film!

-Nana Duffuor